Kirk Weddle’s best photograph: Nirvana’s Nevermind swimming baby
‘Spencer is 27 now. I’d love to shoot him again – he’s got some really good tats these days’
It’s such a great concept: a baby underwater, naked, defenceless, can’t breathe, but still going after the dollar on a fishhook. Nirvana’s record label, Geffen, came to me with the idea. I was marketing myself as the underwater photography guy at the time. But when they asked me to shoot the sleeve [for Nevermind] I had no idea whether I could do it. Shooting a baby was new for me. I really didn’t want to drown the little guy!
I was lucky that my friends had just had a baby, Spencer, and they trusted me with him. The band weren’t on anyone’s radar at that point, so the shoot was really small-scale – there was no art director, no manager or account executive looking over your shoulder.