**Peter Webb photographed The Rolling Stones for their Sticky Fingers album, and famously then lost his negatives for almost 40 years.**

It’s a story that would give any photographer sleepless nights. A classic photo-session for one of the biggest bands on the planet, The Rolling Stones, for the cover of one of their most critically acclaimed albums, 1971‘s Sticky Fingers. Disaster then strikes, as British photographer Peter Webb’s negatives go missing soon after the shoot. Then, out of nowhere, they are discovered again after a gap of almost 40 years.

In early 1972 Peter entrusted his photographer brother-in-law with the safe keeping of an unmarked folder of negatives, which was, as Peter later recalled “…an essential detail which I had conveniently forgotten, in the excitement of being hired by Ridley Scott to direct commercials, and the dark room became a cutting room overnight.”

Almost 40 years later, Peter received a phone call from his brother-in-law, who had by chance found an unmarked bag of negatives amongst his own work and which, as he explained to Peter “…could be the Rolling Stones.” Contained in their pristine negative sleeves were all the group shots from the session, and also an unexpected further delight: some individual plate camera portraits of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards which had never been seen before.

We hosted an exhibition of these lost and found photographs with Peter at our gallery in central London in 2011, and a few years later in 2014 we published a large-format limited edition signed book—which preserved all the surviving photographs from Peter’s historic session with the Stones.&#x20;

Peter Webb passed away in August 2021 – and we will miss him greatly. Happily, his legacy will live on, as we are now working with Peter’s estate to offer photographs from his Rolling Stones archive to collectors as posthumous estate authorised limited editions.


Sticky Fingers - Photographs by Peter Webb