Family Values: Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love & Frances Bean

Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love were notorious for representing the opposite of ＂Family Values.＂ To reframe their notoriety, they consented to a rare photoshoot for Spin magazine with their newborn, Frances Bean. Only 5 images were originally published; the rest of the photoshoot is seen here for the first time.

＂Now the entire family was in bed together, and Hansen remembers how beautiful it was to see everyone in sync. ＂They just were loving Frances. It was really so apparent,＂ she said. ＂It was really about her. They were oblivious to us in a lot of cases, anytime they had the baby.＂’ -- Guzman Interview in CNN

＂Three decades later, Hansen and Peacock are revisiting this fabled shoot for the first time in their new book, Family Values (powerHouse Books), an intimate chronicle of a young couple driven by passion and love that eschewed the trappings of fame and celebrity for truth and art. Through Guzman’s portraits, we see the last of a fading breed: the true rock star who spoke for outsiders, misfits and radicals who wanted nothing more than to live by their own rules.＂ -- AnOther

With an ineffable ability to connect with people through his music, Kurt Cobain was charismatic and full of pathos, something of a lost boy poet struggling against his personal demons while holding the world in thrall. And yet in the midst of his struggles with success, fame, fortune, drugs, and the wounds of a traumatic childhood, he managed in his brief adulthood to get married to Courtney Love--who of course had her own accomplishments as an electrifying and unrestrained lead singer and lyricist. The couple had already emerged as a cultural touchstone when their baby, Frances Bean, was born in 1992. Photographers Guzman captured, amidst toys and pajamas, the sweetness, humor, irony and the simple happiness of a new mom and dad at home with their baby girl.

Family Values is a photography book presenting approximately 90 images featuring Kurt, Courtney, and their baby Frances, one morning in their modest Hollywood home selected from a photoshoot that Guzman did for Spin magazine in 1992. Only five photographs from the shoot were published in the magazine at the time, including the cover. Another appeared in Rolling Stone at the time of Kurt Cobain’s death. In Spin, the photos originally accompanied an interview by Jonathan Poneman, which Guzman plans to license to reprint in the book. The book will also include a memoir of the photo shoot written by Guzman and an introduction by curator and music journalist Michael Azerrad.

Family Values is a photographic assignment that revealed two famous rock stars who during one brief moment transcended the magnifying glass of fame and were revealed, amidst all the chaos, as being just a mom and dad

Guzman is the award-winning husband-and-wife image-making duo Constance Hansen and Russell Peacock. Known both in the U.S. and Europe for a highly sophisticated photographic style and an affinity for the eccentric, Guzman has worked across just about every category, with a concentration in advertising, fashion, music, sports, and celebrity portraits. Their advertising campaigns have included Puma, Nike, Adidas, L’Oreal, Louis Vuitton, Lancome, Givenchy, Evian, Perrier, Tag Heuer, and Absolut. Subjects in music have included: Iggy Pop, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Debbie Harry, Mariah Carey, Missy Elliott, Janet Jackson, Erykah Badu, Alicia Keys, Wyclef Jean, Wu-Tang Clan, 50 Cent, Hole, Sting, Soundgarden, k.d. lang and many more. Sports figures include Tom Brady, LeBron James, David Beckham, Lionel Messi, Christiano Ronaldo, Sergei Federov, and more. Stars of stage and screen include Rachel Weisz, Jamie Foxx, Julianne Moore, Willem Dafoe, Tracy Morgan, Harvey Fierstein, Matt Dillon, Susan Sarandon, Spike Lee, Ethan Hawke, and more.

Hansen, a native of New York who attended the Pratt Institute, and Peacock, a native of England who attended the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Rhode Island School of Design, met in the 1980s and began working together as Guzman in 1985. They now live in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts.

Michael Azerrad is the author of Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991, Come As You Are: the Story of Nirvana, and The Amplified Come as You Are, a deeply annotated version of his Nirvana biography. A former contributing editor for Rolling Stone, he has also written for the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and many other publications.

He has edited and co-authored 24 books--on Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, George Harrison, and Patti Smith, to name a few--and has organized more than 250 exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world of many of the leading artists and music photographers of our time.