Career
His best known work is the cover photography for the 1967 LP Sgt Pepper"s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles. Cooper also created the cover lenticular for the Rolling Stones 1967 LP Their Satanic Majesties Request. In 1964 Cooper met London art dealer Robert Fraser, through whom he was introduced to leading figures in music, art and literature, including The Beatles, The Rolling Stones (the rock band he worked most closely with), Marianne Faithfull, Eric Clapton, artists Cecil Beaton, Andy Warhol, Jann Haworth, Peter Blake and David Hockney and writers William South. Burroughs, Jean Genet, Terry Southern and Allen Ginsberg.
Cooper was one of those present at Keith Richards" house, "Redlands", in Sussex, when a party being held there was raided by police in the late afternoon of 12 February 1967, leading to drugs charges being laid against Richards, Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser.
The project was eventually shelved after the screenplay was returned (unread) by Britain"s Lord Chamberlain, with a note indicating that he would not allow the film to be made because it dealt with "youthful incitement". Cooper committed suicide 1973, caught in a spiral of depression and heroin addiction.
Don"t believe the court when they say that I killed myself when the balance of my mind was disturbed. I just live in a disturbed world, and, as the old poem says, "I hear the sound of a different drum.".
I come from what your generation will call the "Half and Halves".
A generation that made a few changes, but had to experience too many other kinds of changes they had no control over, so some of us were bound to fall by the wayside. I"m one of those. A lavish book of Cooper"s photographs, Blinds and Shutters, edited by Brian Roylance, was published in a limited edition in 1990 by Genesis Publications. A retrospective exhibition of his photography with the same title was held at the Atlas Gallery, London in September–October 2003.
Cooper"s photographs also feature in the book Michael Cooper: You Are Here – The London Sixties, edited by Robin Muir, and in the book The Early Stones, edited by Perry Richardson.