You may not know the name of English photographer Mick Rock, but you know his work. Lou Reed staring from the Transformer sleeve. Iggy Pop advertising Raw Power in all his savage glory. Queen looming like femme fatales from the darkness. And he was there snapping away when David Bowie transformed from hippie troubadour into the glam beast Ziggy Stardust.

Like Annie Liebowitz defining modern celebrity with her Vanity Fair covers, Rock fashioned the '70s rock star. Just flip through his new books, Killer Queen, a visual document of Freddie Mercury and the guys, and Picture This, his portfolio of Blondie images. The pictures luxuriate in vivid color and fantastic costumes. His subjects hover between male and female, larger than life with looks that kill.

"I'm interested in image, persona, and aura," the 56-year-old Rock tells VH1. "I don't really give a bugger about realistic photography. That's for war photographers. We're dealing with art here."

Rock fell into his art by accident. He attended Cambridge University, studying "modern languages - and the modern language of psychedelics." One afternoon he began to play around with his blonde girlfriend, a pal's camera, and some of those aforementioned chemicals - and discovered his passion.

Rock enjoyed a romp through the rock scene as Sgt. Pepper gave way to Ziggy Stardust. Photos of his friend Syd Barrett - the original leader of Pink Floyd - opened the doors to the underground magazine circuit. But his career really flourished when he met David Bowie.

In early 1972, Bowie had yet to take off. "Space Oddity" had tickled the British charts in 1969, but as Rock says, Bowie was regarded as some kind of gimmick act. The photographer became obsessed after hearing the singer's Hunky Dory.

"He was just popping his head above the radar with his Ziggy Stardust guise," Rock remembers. "The first time I saw him play, there were only 300 people in the audience.

Rock interviewed and photographed him, pressing magazines to commission more Bowie stories. "Alice Cooper was running wild at the time, and [David] had a freak value," Rock says. "This draggy, glammy, theatrical rock 'n' roll was in the air - and out came Mr. B."

With the release of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, Bowie became the de facto leader of the glam movement. Rock's camera was on hand as he pushed the limits of fashion and sexuality. He photographed Bowie fellating Mick Ronson's guitar, and created a famous series of pictures that cast the singer as a blitzed space buccaneer in a pink-painted studio. They captured an essence of what Rock calls the "fairly alien breed" of the '70s rock star.

"When Bowie saw those pictures, he said, 'Mick sees me the way I see myself.'"

When Iggy Pop and Lou Reed fell under Bowie's glittery spell, Rock also began documenting their changes. Pop was a Detroit wiseguy. Reed was a poet of New York's heroin bohemia. By the time Rock finished shooting, both had become avatars of glam, reveling in the blurring of gender, stacked heels, and make-up.

"At this time anyone who had some kind of career going and wanted to look a bit like a girl would walk through my door," Rock laughs. As well as photographing legends like Reed and Pop, Rock was living the life with them. "I totally identified," he says. "I was completely transfixed, and the images prove it."

Soon Queen looked to Rock to help make them the most talked about band on the British music scene. "Queen wanted to get some attention and the music on their first album hadn't quite done it," Rock says. "They realized that if you could catch people's eyes you could get them interested in music."

Their first session together certainly raised eyebrows. Rock shot them with their shirts off. "They look like they're naked," Rock says. "They also looked like a bunch of schoolgirls. I remember the rest of the band wincing at some of the comments and Freddie [Mercury] just loving it. He didn't give a damn."

Rock was hired to create the Queen II album cover, and was inspired by a still of the actress Marlene Dietrich from Shanghai Express a friend had given him. "Shooting Marlene Dietrich [must have been] a breeze," Rock explains, "because she was a consummate poser. But shooting Queen so delicately and perfectly took some doing."

The resulting shot of Queen standing in diamond formation, heads tilted back like Easter Island statues, has rightly become a classic. The band almost nixed it because they felt it was too pretentious. Mercury, who Rock calls Queen's "visual animal," convinced them otherwise. "It made them look like much bigger a deal then they were at the time," Rock says, "but it was a true reflection of their music."

Punk shunted those lush Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics to one side, but one new wave band shared Rock's love of Hollywood glamour. "You can't take a bad picture of Debbie Harry," Rock says. "What I did better than anybody was capture the Marilyn [Monroe] aspect of her image."

"David and Debbie are probably the finest photo subjects south of Elvis Presley," he continues. "She was 30 before I took any of those pictures. She was not a Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera; and yet look at her! Nobody looked better."

Years of excess eventually caught up with Rock and a heart bypass surgery sidelined him in 1996. But he's still working. He recently shot the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and would love to get Gwen Stefani before his lens. And the past also provides a living. Rock's monographs are also an enduring reminder of a time when the notion of what rock stars were supposed to look like was still a work in progress.

"I'm lucky," he says, "I couldn't have planned any of this. Today, a lot of fashion designers say, 'You had a huge influence on me.' I think, 'Well I wasn't looking at it that way!' I just needed to be close to the music and people who were at the cutting edge of my times."