Born in England and brought up in Southern Ireland, Fergus Greer studied at St Martin's School of Art, London. He then went to the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst and served four years with the Irish Guards. Greer left the army to pursue a career in photography, first working as a photographic assistant with a number of photographers including Richard Avedon and later as studio manager to Terence Donovan.
As a freelance photographer, Greer worked for a variety of magazines and regularly shot covers for The Sunday Times Magazine. He moved to Los Angeles in 1997 and photographed for leading American and international magazines while continuing to work on personal projects.
As an officially accredited war artist, in the late 1990s he documented the war in Kosovo, and published a book of these photographs in June 2001. He also collaborated with the Australian performance artist Leigh Bowery to produce Leigh Bowery Looks: Photographs 1988-1994 (2001).
Leigh Bowery (1961-1994) was the ultimate performance artist, fashion designer, nightclub sensation, art object, aspiring pop-star and above all an icon whose influence traversed music, art, film and fashion worlds. Perhaps he is best-known for his role as a nude model for some of Lucian Freud’s most iconic paintings; ironic for the man who was infamous for his costumes. Bowery arrived in London in 1980 from Sunshine, Australia, collaborated notoriously with the dancer Michael Clark, and was proprietor of the infamous 1980s Soho nightclub, ‘Taboo’.
