New Oasis Book Shares Behind-The-Scenes Photos of the Britpop Icons (Exclusive)

Sixteen years after their backstage breakup at a music festival in France, British rock band Oasis is back. As seen through their sold-out Live ’25 world tour, which kicked off this summer in Wales, fans of all ages have welcomed the Britpop group’s return with open arms, in what’s become one of the year’s most talked-about (and heartwarming) live concert events.

But for renowned music photographer Jill Furmanovsky, who has been documenting the band — and its sibling frontmen Noel and Liam Gallagher — since the early days of their career, the long-awaited reunion is especially poignant.

“The only thing that’s changed is that they’re now deliberately and genuinely connecting,” Furmanovsky, 72, tells PEOPLE.

The photographer captures her decades-long creative partnership with the band in new photo book Oasis: Trying to Find a Way Out of Nowhere, out Oct. 14 from Thames & Hudson. She worked on the book — which includes over 500 images of Oasis, from the ’90s up until the Live ’25 tour — alongside Noel, who edited and wrote commentary for the project.

Furmanovsky, whose family immigrated from Zimbabwe to London in 1965, first fell in love with music photography after she took a photo of Paul McCartney outside his home with an Instamatic camera as a young girl. While in art school, she photographed the band Yes during a concert at the Rainbow Theatre for a class assignment, and soon gained a part-time job as the venue’s house photographer.

“I became professional within a week when I had an opportunity like that, and then I never looked back,” she says. Over the next five decades, Furmanovsky would photograph countless music legends like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Ozzy Osbourne and Amy Winehouse.

Furmanovsky was well into her career when she first met Oasis, at a gig at Cambridge Corn Exchange in Cambridge, England in 1994. At the time, she was putting together a retrospective photo book of her work entitled The Moment, and was in search of a newer group to round out the collection.

“They were already quite popular,” Furmanovsky recalls of the Manchester band. “They weren’t playing in big stadiums or anything. The first album [Definitely Maybe] had just come out, but they were on their way up.” 

“I was surprised when I was in the pit to see how little happened on the stage,” she adds. “Obviously, Liam is very charismatic as a voice but he certainly didn’t do anything, hands behind his back, singing … Normally when there’s an audience going wild, the band is doing various poses or guitar solos. There was nothing of that, but the songs were so very, very good.”

After that gig, Furmanovsky became one of Oasis’s main photographers. Then 40, she says that she was “somewhere between an auntie or a mom or a much older sister” to the band, who were in their 20s at the time.

“I felt very passionately about them and about the brothers,” she says. “I thought I could really do something good with them, and they had very good people around them that also thought that.”

Furmanovsky accompanied the band during their first tour in the United States, and remembers the “thrill” everyone felt at being in the country. Oasis was particularly excited to play San Francisco’s historic venue The Fillmore — though offstage, they had other priorities.

“They more or less only ate McDonald’s,” she says. “I was like, ‘We’re in San Francisco. They’ve got some of the best food in the whole world here.’ ‘No, we want McDonald’s.’ That did change, but that sums up that they hadn’t quite landed.”

Trying to Find a Way Out of Nowhere documents Oasis’ seismic rise to fame, particularly after the release of their 1995 album What’s the Story (Morning Glory?), which included hits like “Wonderwall,” “Don’t Look Back in Anger” and “Champagne Supernova.” Within two years, the band went from playing tiny nightclubs to sold-out stadiums.

One standout show for Furmanovsky was the group’s two-night hometown stint at Maine Road in 1996. It was the same stadium where the Gallaghers grew up watching their beloved Manchester City football team.

“I remember Noel sitting in the window, looking out when the show was over on his own,” she says. “To have the whole place to themselves for two whole nights with an audience that were with them every step of the way — I think it was a very, very significant moment for all of them.”

But for all the good times, Furmanovsky also captures the infamous tension between Liam and Noel that would lead to the band’s breakup in 2009. The book’s cover image, taken during a 1995 trip to Paris, was snapped during a tumultuous shoot. Per the book, Liam showed up late for the photo session after a night spent at the hotel bar, leaving Noel furious.

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“Maybe in the hands of another photographer, [the photo] wouldn’t have happened at all,” Furmanovsky says. “I had so much experience working with punks that I could ride the situation. I love that they allowed those shots to be published.”

It helped, too, that the Gallaghers proved to be “fantastic” subjects, whose “gift” to Furmanovsky was allowing that closeness in the first place. She was touched by how their working-class childhood, raised by their single mother Peggy, was reflected in their personalities.

“Noel and Liam were two totally different characters, basically bonded by an upbringing that was quite difficult, and by music, and their two incredibly different but dovetailing talents, which are only now really being understood,” she says.

Furmanovsky saw the multi-generational adoration of Oasis firsthand when she photographed the band during one of their reunion shows at London’s Wembley Stadium in July. It was a full circle moment, she notes, to have shared the pit with the team of young photographers and videographers documenting the tour.

“I’m very happy to pass on the flame,” she says. “They’ve done such an incredible job. I feel terribly proud of them.”

Continuing that legacy is exactly why Furmanovsky wanted to create Trying to Find a Way Out of Nowhere for the band’s fans, old and new.

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“I’ve always known that it was my best body of work,” she says. “Folks will look at [the book], and then add on what’s now happening, and make more sense of what came before. There’s a continuum about it that’s just absolutely beautiful.”

Oasis: Trying to Find a Way Out of Nowhere is now available, wherever books are sold.