‘We immediately loved them’: What it was like to photograph Kurt Cobain and family in 1992

By Brian Braiker

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‘Family Values’ is out now by powerHouse books

For about 40 years now, the husband and wife team of Constance Hansen and Russell Peacock has created an indelible body of photography produced under the name Guzman. Their incredible run in the ‘80s and ‘90s included album covers for Janet Jackson, Debbie Harry, Jody Watley, En Vogue, Luscious Jackson, Hole. They’ve shot Iggy Pop. They’ve shot Diddy, Harvey Fierstein, Harry Belafonte and countless others. Now, they have a new book out. It’s called “Family Values: Kurt, Courtney and Frances Bean,” and it’s a series of incredibly intimate never-before-seen photos taken in one day at the home of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, five weeks after their daughter Frances Bean, was born in 1992 — and a year after Cobain had rocketed to superstardom in the wake of Nirvana’s classic album “Nevermind.”

This week I’m joined on the podcast by Hansen and Peacock, whose book takes its name from an infamous Spin magazine cover story, which they were commissioned to shoot in the aftermath of a devastating Vanity Fair profile on the couple, who was fighting to regain custody of their daughter. The Spin article featured just five of the nearly 100 photos they took that day.

The new book, with a foreword by journalist and author Michael Azerrad, resurfaces all of those images in a package by powerHouse books, roughly timed to coincide with the anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death by suicide 30 years ago. Here, we talk about that day, what they remember about the young family, their process and highlights of their career, like hanging out with Iggy Pop. They also talk about one of their more challenging photo shoots. Soundgarden, we’re looking at you.

The following is a transcript of our conversation, which airs as an episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast,” edited for clarity. Listen in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.

Photo by Guzman

“Family Values” takes its name from the super famous 1992 Spin Magazine cover with Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love and their five-week-old daughter at the time, Frances Bean. The article itself only included five photos I think I heard, but you took over close to 100 that day, right?
Constance Hansen: At least.
Russell Peacock: Yeah, but that’s not unusual for a regular photo shoot. You see lots more pictures than will ever be published.

When you go back to look at photos you took 30 years ago, you must see things you didn’t see the first time around. You’re a different person, you have a different perspective. Did that happen here?
Hansen: Absolutely. And also, historically, all the things that happened after we took the pictures, meaning how the world played out and how our lives played out. So when we look at it, we look at it completely with new eyes, really. Old eyes.

New old eyes.
Peacock: All artists go through this, I think. It could be a musician, painter, sculptor. You go back and you revisit stuff you did a long time ago and it’s a whole different context for your editing process.

Walk us back to that day. You show up at their house, we’ll contextualize the shoot a bit, but there’s no entourage. It’s just a family of three. Courtney welcomes you in with freshly delivered guava pies. What was your intent that day? What was the assignment? What is your interpretation of the assignment?
Peacock: It’s quite simple. We’re in a studio and we were quite busy at that time, and we had a studio manager and they get the call and we have this shoot for Spin. “Do you want to do it?” So we look at the schedule like, “Yeah, we can fit it in there,” and that’s pretty much it. I don’t recall ever talking to Spin Magazine about the shoot. And this is the way it was back then. It was very fluid. Now, given the fact that they probably looked at your work, they’ve sent the work to Kurt and Courtney perhaps. So there’s a lot of pre-editing going on before you get the call.
Hansen: And also, we don’t know what the conversation was between Kurt and Courtney and Spin. That could have been a whole dialogue that we weren’t privy to.

Maybe, at least now in retrospect, a lot of the things that I’ve read about this particular shoot was that it came on the heels of a Vanity Fair article that was essentially a hit piece on them. It really painted them in a super negative light.
Hansen: It’s really horrible.

Was that in your mind when you went over there?
Peacock: We had read it. So that was in our head. But you don’t think of how to shoot them. You just go to shoot them. You don’t really have an agenda. You just try to get good pictures and that’s very basic.
Hansen: We did come with some ideas that we thought might work. We do have kind of a twisted sense of humor, so probably with all the stuff that was happening behind with this whole Courtney and Kurt thing and babies and Tipper Gore and … we were ready to poke fun.
Peacock: Obviously, we’re photographing them in their home, but they are babies, so that gives parameters of what we’re there to do, and we had the Vanity Fair article in our heads, so that was pretty much the framework of going into the shoot.

It’s a very precarious time, and I think it’s interesting that you said you went in there with a sort of twisted sense of humor, which may not have potentially gone over well if not executed accurately. I would imagine.
Hansen: I don’t know what could have happened, but I think we were pushing back on the article of what is “family values.” That word, family values, never entered our minds.

It was in the ether because of the Republican Party and Newt Gingrich.
Peacock: We’re in our own bubble at that time. So we had our own things we wanted to do. We’re not journalists, we’re magazine photographers.

Which is, you could argue is a form of journalism. You’re framing a narrative. So that’s the background with which you show up. You show up with that floating around in your head and you have this idea of shooting them in a domestic setting but poking fun at it. What’s it like when you show up? There’s no team there. There’s no handlers.
Hansen: They had the hair and makeup that were there. Apparently, there was a stylist who we never met or never saw. Now, he might’ve just dropped off something for them and then, left because we really never met him. And in fact, we just found out about them, and you’ll probably be the first one to know. He contacted us after the book came out because someone gifted him the book and all of us were writing like, well, I guess it was Courtney that had the robe. She has taste. We didn’t know where the robe came from.

It was very Hugh Hefner almost.
Peacock: Where did it come from? So we thought, well maybe Courtney picked it up, but it turns out yeah, the stylist.
Hansen: Yeah, somebody contacted us through our website to tell us Israel Siegel, I think.
Peacock: The most important thing is Kurt decided to put the robe on. He didn’t have to put it on. He obviously was in on the joke and he thought it’d be funny.

Photo by Guzman

Kurt was not there at first, right? You walk in and it’s Courtney who greets you and you don’t see him right away.
Hansen: No, he wasn’t around. We were just hanging out while Courtney was having hair and makeup.
Peacock: So we were just sitting in the living room. We started taking pictures of stuff around the house. A lot of the pictures that are in the book of the toy collection and just various items in the room. We were just killing time, basically.

Killing time, but also probably picking up a vibe. You get a sense of who they might be, a little bit.
Hansen: We never really killed time. We don’t sit around, “Oh, we’re waiting for a photo.” We just start taking pictures.
Peacock: Yeah, “killing time” is not the right word. You don’t know how long you’re going to be there.
Hansen: They might decide you have to leave now.

What were you able to intuit from their home just by looking around?
Hansen: I think we immediately loved them, because it was just right up our alley, all the tourings, the collages, it was a lot of artwork, art supplies. It was something that we were familiar with.
Peacock: It was a creative space. They didn’t care about impressing anyone with their interior decor.

And at one point you decide that Kurt is not coming down, so you go upstairs to find him.
Hansen: Two pictures of Courtney and then we were like, “We got to get up.”
Peacock: Yeah. “We got to get going here.” So we asked Courtney if we could go upstairs because quite honestly, photographing people in bed is kind of great. We didn’t want to just walk up there, so we asked permission and I guess Courtney.
Hansen: She said, “Well, he’s tired. He’s not getting up yet.” And we were like, “That’s okay. We’ll shoot him in bed.”
Peacock: We’re on it. We walked upstairs with all our stuff and there he was sitting in bed, which is kind of surreal to meet someone for the first time in their bed.

You’re not only meeting someone in bed for the first time, but he’s at the peak of his fame. “Nevermind” had been out and he rocketed them to superstardom. It was out for about a year, I guess, at that point. Did he seem unwell? Was he circumspect? Was he welcoming? Was he aloof?
Peacock: It was a little chill. Yeah, circumspect is a good word.
Hansen: Yeah, but he wasn’t unfriendly. He was just very gentle. “Here I am in bed.”
Peacock: It was kind of how we imagined he would be. Reading what we had. Maybe we thought he was tired, late night. I don’t know. After thinking about all this and talking to Michael Azerrad at about this, I kind of think that he planned all along to be photographed in bed.

You were almost lured up there.
Peacock: I have a feeling he could have just said, “I had this idea.” But he didn’t do it that way. It’s kind of a mystery, but he did get all dressed up. He wouldn’t get all dressed up if he didn’t want to be photographed in bed.

And then, you’re with him alone for a minute, but then Courtney comes in with the baby and the dynamic shifts.
Hansen: Yeah, it was great.
Peacock: He changed his mood for sure.

These photos are beautiful. And I think this is a testament of a great photo, removing the context of who they are — if you don’t know anything about them — there are these almost painfully intimate photos of young, beautiful people. I don’t know how you would characterize it. It’s the intimacy that really comes off the page.
Peacock: I don’t know if you’ve had a child, but you’re kind of exhausted but elated and it’s a universal thing. Looking back … and it took us 30 years to kind of look at these pictures, “Oh that’s what these pictures are about. There’s something universal here.” Yeah, they’re rock stars, but they’re also just like everybody else.

Photo by Guzman

Where the “family values” part of it comes in, finally, is you’re shooting a little later, and Kurt writes “Family Values” on Courtney’s belly. And that was unscripted as far as you’re concerned or maybe he had scripted it?
Hansen: That was really a surprise. Basically, he vandalized Courtney’s belly and then, he went inside where his art supplies were and he wrote on his own belly “Diet Grrrl.” It’s Riot Grrrl, and we were like, “Okay.”
Peacock: We were like, “Is Courtney going to get upset?” Looking at interviews with the other band members or Nirvana, this is kind of how Kurt worked. He wouldn’t maybe communicate his ideas, but they would just kind of appear and through lyrics or ideas.
Hansen: He was a very, very thoughtful person because even arranging his toys, he was telling a story. So his lyrics, he told stories. Everything was telling a story. The Nixon pin on the robe. The robe itself, I don’t think he would’ve put anything on he didn’t want to wear.

Clues is a good way to say it, I think it’s more clues than a story.
Hansen: Yeah, absolutely. It was just clues. It was just these tidbits of leaving us breadcrumbs throughout the house.

I love that. And it’s also in the Family Values thing, a very clear “fuck you” to the establishment.
Peacock: They didn’t get the memo. They were supposed to behave, but despite the sabotaging of it —
Hansen: They were a beautiful family.
Peacock: That comes through despite the way they were trying to subvert it.

When that issue came out and those images came out, it had a huge impact. Even if the writing may have been a little puffy, I can’t imagine a piece of music journalism having an impact like that in 2024.
Hansen: It was interesting because we do the story, we move on to the next story. We put the box on the shelf, but what happened was we started posting just a few pictures on Instagram and this is maybe three years ago. And the response was tremendous because there were all these people, who, this was what they hung on their high school wall in their bedroom. It didn’t occur to me that Family Values was really the real name of the whole shoot.

So this is a couple of years ago. Images start resurfacing and then you do a gallery show or two, and now this book is out to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death.
Peacock: It all started with the gallery show. They saw the show and they said, “You should do a book.”
Hansen: The book powerHouse maybe realized that their anniversary was coming up.
Peacock: I think that’s coincidence though because it started a couple years before. We’re not that organized.

I think the industry loves an anniversary, so that probably makes sense from a marketing standpoint. I like powerHouse books. It’s the 30th anniversary, but obviously at that moment, like you were saying, you’re in a young family’s home, it’s intimate. You had no idea that this guy would go on to sort of transcend generations, become a cultural touchstone for millions of people. You couldn’t have predicted that then. Do you understand why or how it happened?
Hansen: It’s amazing. His lyrics are extraordinary.
Peacock: A lot of it is timing. A lot of it is their talent.
Hansen: Well, he’s completely a genius. There was something different though because this was so new, it was so original. It’s still very distinctive and people are still listening to this music as if it was yesterday. I’m always amazed when I see a 17-year-old with a Nirvana T-shirt. There’s a huge group of people out there that just can’t get enough of them.
Peacock: The culture decides on the markers to signify a period in time and you can’t control that. It just happens.

Were you much older than him?
Peacock: I was seven years older. Connie was—
Hansen: 18 years older.

You’re a cradle robber.
Hansen: [Laughs.] Yes. That’s true.

Photo by Guzman

And now, 30 years later, obviously, the book is out. These images still have relevance, as you were just saying, you must not have seen a lot of these photos in recent years, I would guess. So, was it sort of new to you?
Hansen: They’re in analog too. So these were filmed in Polaroid, in Polaroid negative. So to see them we were scanning to anybody else to see them. We had to go through our archives, so it was a workout.

Have you ever had to go back and find a shoot and just not been able to track down the photos or are you pretty organized?
Hansen: It’s actually one of the photos in this shoot. It was one of the photos. I think Courtney put in her memoir. And for some reason the negative just vanished. It’s probably here someplace.

At the time you’d been shooting a lot of hip hop artists and some really iconic stuff. I imagine every shoot is its own thing, and then of course there’s shooting in someone’s home versus a studio. Did this stand out to you at the time?
Peacock: It’s very unusual at that time, to photograph someone at their house. Most times it would be in a studio, us people, especially now, more than then, they’re not comfortable with showing their house. It’s intimate. So this was pretty unique. I mean there was Ozzy Osbourne in his house.
Hansen: Ozzy’s house was set up with lights. You could turn on lights in the room.
Peacock: Yeah, because he had the reality show. If you can photograph somebody in their home, it’s the best because they’re comfortable.
Hansen: I think it’s also the intimacy of the entire situation. For example, there weren’t handlers. In those days, most of the time that really was the case. You would just show up someplace and you would wing it. You might not have the opportunity to do a scout or anything like that, especially editorial. You just show up. You have to be quick on your feet. You develop trust. Your persona has to be in a way where you’re not threatening and you can interact with people. So when I met these two people and the baby, I had this total feeling of they’re so beautiful, protective, and being a new mother, I just was in awe and plus, we were big fans of their music.
Peacock: We had these back-pocket ideas of domestic chores we’d have them do, but I think intuitively we knew, let’s just hold off on that. Let’s just see where they want to go. Getting back to you don’t know how much time you have. As Connie said, you want to gain their trust. You’re open to their ideas.

Photo by Guzman

Yeah, gaining trust on the clock under the gun has got to be a challenge.
Peacock: It is. Sometimes right off the bat, it’s unicorns and rainbows, but sometimes right off the bat, it’s also very tense.

Give me an example of a tense shoot.
Hansen: For example, when someone doesn’t want to do something, like if you have ideas. Soundgarden, we have this idea that we actually executed, we got a boat, we put it on a flatbed. We got a truck to pull the boat and we were in Manhattan and we were going to put the band in the boat and we were going to drive around Manhattan and take pictures of them in this boat. So we were thinking, “Oh, isn’t this great?”
Peacock: How could you not love our idea? Chris Cornell goes, “Nah.”
Hansen: Yeah. “No way.” So we just went inside to this empty studio.
Peacock: That was a situation where it was tense in the beginning. It was a situation where maybe we should have just eased in to the idea.
Hansen: We had another idea, which was the chainsaw. And the chainsaw really made them so happy.

Lead with the chainsaw.
Hansen: Because what happened was they played with this chainsaw. We got fabulous pictures, and then, they looked at us and they said, let’s do the boat, completely dark out. So we couldn’t do the boat.
Peacock: This is the fun part of working with bands is they’re so capricious, you don’t know what’s going to happen and you kind of have to roll with it. Think fast, and sometimes you leave a shoot frustrated. Sometimes it all goes according to plan.
Hansen: Well, most of the time you get something,
Peacock: Your main thing is to get something. You’re competing against all the other images and you want to do something different. You want to be considerate of the band and their image and where they want to go. So it’s that connection. They approved you, you’re sort of going in the same track.
Hansen: What makes it fun is when they start playing, it’s like just giving something and then, they start playing with that idea and then, they take it to another level. And for me, that is so important to have this … It’s like when you’re on a playground, you want to play and that means you have to take turns playing. This is kind of our attitude. Photography and especially coming into these situations, it’s really just a lot of fun, especially for people with short attention spans. We’re always changing. We always have something different and new to do and something new to solve. It’s not like rote. So you always have to be thinking quickly and scanning the room for ideas when you walk in, see what’s happening. Vibe the room. Feeling how that person is feeling that day, what you think you can pull out of them. And some people play like crazy and it’s a lot of fun and some people they give you a little bit and you ask for more.
Peacock: The other issue with bands is you have the whole band dynamic and they’d be fighting. One person likes the idea, the other person doesn’t. Then, going into the shoot, you don’t know that dynamic, but it kind of unfolds and then, a year later you heard a story about them breaking up, and they were on the shoot together.

You were shooting all of these in the heyday for journalism and music journalism specifically, and photography. And now, we’re in the Instagram TikTok era. Do you still get to do these types of shoots? Do you want to do these types of shoots?
Hansen: The whole thing is entirely different. We’re at a different stage in our career. There’s always going to be creatives and brilliant photographers. It doesn’t matter what the equipment is. They’ll make it work. We’re not looking for anything right now. We literally moved out of the city and moved into the woods. Right now, we could get our archives straightened out. It’d be great. We’re shooting a lot of artists. There’s a lot of artists up here, so that’s something we’re interested in.

It’s an incredible list. Everyone from Debbie Harry to Jody Watley, En Vogue, Hole, Iggy Pop, Diddy, Harvey Fierstein. There’s an interesting one.
Hansen: Yeah, he was great and we actually were on the cover of his book. He asked us for that picture.
Peacock: Actors are very interesting to photograph because they naturally want to be a character, so they’re kind of open to your ideas. You better have some ideas because they’re kind of receptive to that. Musicians are different.

Do you have a high point of someone that you got to meet that you were truly, “That’s it for me.”
Peacock: I think Iggy Pop was pretty close to being the top just because he’s such an iconic figure and we photographed him not too long ago, and it was for the London Sunday Times. He was probably 70. The plan was to photograph him after the concert in Philadelphia. We said, well, let’s bring cameras and shoot him on stage. So we were at either end of the stage while he was performing. So we got these amazing concert shots and we rarely do. That’s a whole different part of photography, but just seeing him perform and stage dive and just being carried off, because he was so exhausted, he had a glass of wine and then, he is like, “Okay, I’m ready for you.” His batteries were so drained. We had all these ideas jumping around and stuff. There was no way he was going to be able to do that. He performed probably close to two hours. I really liked the shots we got. He looked his age.
Hansen: That was a great one. That was fun.
Peacock: We had maybe 15 minutes to shoot him in a back room somewhere.

I can only imagine. He must have been a trip to hang out with. Russell, you were in England and Constance, you’re from New York. How did you two meet? It was what, back in ’83? I think I read. Constance, you were already steadily working as a still life photographer.
Peacock: I went to arts school. She introduced us. I started working for Connie. The first thing she made me do was clean the oven, because the oven was going to be photographed —
Hansen: You had a bad attitude.
Peacock: I just thought she wanted me to clean her oven, and I’m like, “Geez, all my illusions were like shattered.”

Not love at first sight then, it sounds like.
Peacock: Well, I think that’s the last time I ever cleaned the oven, man.

Why Guzman? Where did that come from?
Hansen: I think it was because there were two of us and that was not anything that was happening at that time. There weren’t teams. We had started photographing nightlife because we were always going out. So it was our friends and people that we knew. So we were photographing after doing money jobs. And then, we decided that we really wanted to do more of that, so we came up with this name that no one would in a million years think you made it up. It was just like this name.
Peacock: It wasn’t like “Connie Hansen and Russell Peacock.” It was just —
Hansen: One name.
Peacock: We were in a book talk in L.A. and the person that we were talking with, she talked about her memory of our work and she’s a very respected photographer in her own right, and she was saying, “Guzman, I kept seeing this name and it was this brand.” And we were like, “Wow, brand.” And that’s the last thing we, at the time, were thinking about. Back in the mid 80, no one really thought about brands.

And I read Connie that your background is in sculpture.
Hansen: I went to art school for art and then, what happened was I took a photo course and I thought, this is going to be my life, and I was maybe well, 19. I got my Nikon and I just never stopped. I taught for about seven years in Newark, New Jersey in school for students that were gifted in art and music, at Arts High School and still I have students that are friends. I took a course at the new school in Studio Lighting, because I thought I should learn that, and the guy said to me, “You should be a commercial photographer.” And I didn’t know what that was. That’s kind of how I tumbled into that.
Peacock: It’s kind of funny because I also went to arts school and the whole idea of being a, quote, commercial photographer. No one ever really addressed. It was all art photography, at least in my experience. And then, when you arrive in New York, there’s this whole other world going on. It’s like the center of the media universe. It dawns on you, all these different avenues are possible. Maybe it’s a good thing that you learn about this later. You apply everything you learned in arts school to this commercial world.

Well, it’s like Andy Warhol starting out as a graphic designer, right?
Peacock: You never lose that art background. Everything you do, it could be the most commercial of jobs. You’re trying to figure out how to make it interesting and visually unique.
Hansen: And we’ve been known for this, art and commerce, there’s an intersection. You play with it, because you can take your commerce now. We’ve been revisiting archives, taking things we did commercially and turning them into something else.
Peacock: And that’s kind of our comfort zone. That middle area where they interact.

Any advice for creative couples as we start to wrap things up? You seem to have made it work.
Hansen: Yeah, people are surprised. It’s hard to make it work. I mean, you have to have a similar aesthetic. If we didn’t have a similar aesthetic, it’d be like bloodbaths. There’d be no way.

How do you describe that aesthetic?
Hansen: It’s sophisticated with a sense of humor.
Peacock: It’s also getting into that part commerce dialogue. We have an advantage, because we’ve been together for so long, we can float in and out of our interactions. I think it’d be a lot harder for someone who’s older to meet someone and then work together.
Hansen: Well, we grew up together.
Peacock: I think you have to give each other a lot of space. It’s not so different than musicians working together in a band where they do this great work and then, they have to take a break. They want to go in a different direction, and you kind of have to allow that to happen because that’s natural. You’re not just going to flow, but you’re all going in the same direction.
Hansen: They take side things, but there’s always the band.

A solo album. Yeah.
Hansen: I think what happens is, is that you realize that the sound that you’re making together is what’s interesting.
Peacock: But it takes time to recognize that.

Check out this episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast” for more. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts.