Art Review | 'Who Shot Rock & Roll'
Every Picture Tells a Story, Don't It?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/arts/design/30rock.html
By KEN JOHNSON
Published: October 29, 2009
Rock 'n' roll and photography need each other or, at least, rock
musicians need photographers. You can't be a star if you don't have
an image. But what makes a good rock photograph is something to
ponder, and "Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to
the Present" at the Brooklyn Museum offers an excellent opportunity to do so.
Organized by the photography historian Gail Buckland, the exhibition
presents more than 175 images by 105 photographers, and includes
album cover art, candid snapshots, publicity portraits and pictures
of live performances.
Leaving aside aesthetic issues, it is hard to say what makes a
high-quality rock photograph. So much depends on what you bring to
it. For many viewers Richard Avedon's pellucid black-and-white
portraits of the Beatles in 1967 will resonate differently from David
LaChappelle's garishly colorful 1999 picture of the white hip-hop
star Eminem sitting naked but holding a strategically placed stick of
dynamite with a sparkling fuse.
It is not gratuitous to mention that Eminem is white, by the way,
because most of the performers depicted are too. There are some
pictures of black performers, but all have achieved crossover
recognition, from Chuck Berry and Aretha Franklin to Tina Turner,
Grace Jones and L L Cool J. This is an exhibition about what the
white middle class has been listening to over the last 60 years:
classic rock, as they call it on the radio. It could have been culled
from past issues of People, and its impact is lessened because so
many of these performers are already overexposed.
In the coffee table book that accompanies the show, Ms. Buckland
argues that rock photography should be viewed like fashion
photography, which has received considerable respect in recent
decades. But fashion photography is more immediately visual; you
don't have to know who the model is or who designed the clothes to be
interested. With rock photographs it matters who the subject is.
Knowing that the bearded young man smiling genially at the camera in
a 1972 photograph by Lynn Goldsmith is Bruce Springsteen greatly
enhances the experience of an otherwise nondescript picture, for fans
of the Boss, anyway.
One way to make rock photographs more interesting would be to analyze
them as sociological or anthropological documents. Examining them
according to some quasi-scientific system could bring to light
meanings and metaphors that we have come to take for granted in the
cult of rock. Hero worship, sexual aggression, gender role-playing,
youthful rebellion and the triumph of neo-primitivism in a
consumerist age of unprecedented scientific, technological and
industrial progress: these are topics worth examining.
A chapter could be devoted to the motif of the rock star who destroys
his guitar during a performance, as in Ed Caraeff's sequence of four
pictures of Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar on fire at the Monterey
Pop Festival in 1967 or Pennie Smith's grainy image of Paul Simonon
of the Clash swinging his bass by the neck in a blur of Dionysian
catharsis. What do such sacrificial actions mean beyond the obvious
theatrical expression of pent-up fury? Focused mainly on the fame,
charisma and notoriety of its subjects, this exhibition offers few
illuminating perspectives.
That said, it is an entertaining and sometimes absorbing show.
Particularly for baby boomers, the demographic whose taste it most
clearly represents, it is powerfully nostalgic. Perceptions of youth
and age have a lot to do with it. To study images of Elvis Presley,
Madonna and others when they were starting out is to marvel at the
youth of those who created the huge global industry of today's pop music.
For viewers who lived through the British Invasion of the early
1960s, going from Philip Townsend's 1963 portrait of the smooth-faced
Rolling Stones before they ever recorded an album to Mark Seliger's
2005 image of a craggy, sinewy sexagenarian Mick Jagger leaning
against a brick wall is truly affecting. However distant the lives of
rock stars may be from ours, somehow we grow up with them and sooner
or later find ourselves old like them.
Of course, some did not get old. Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, Janis
Joplin, Jim Morrison and Tupac Shakur will remain forever young, and
pictures of them evoke thoughts of what might have been.
Especially poignant is Judy Linn's black-and-white photograph of a
young Patti Smith relaxing on a sofa bed in the messy apartment she
shared with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the early 1970s,
before either became famous. It is breathtaking to think of how much
has transpired since then. Ms. Smith became the godmother of punk;
Mr. Mapplethorpe's fearlessly homoerotic photography made him a
lightning rod for the family-values set in the 1980s. A big segment
of a creative generation, including Mr. Mapplethorpe, was lost to AIDS.
A few of the show's photographers have more ambitious artistic aims.
Andreas Gursky's huge 2001 photograph made by digitally piecing
together views of several Madonna concerts surveys the spectacle of
modern rock from an Olympian distance. Ryan McGinley's blurry,
blue-toned image of a crowd watching a Morrissey concert from 2005 or
2006 tries to say something about the nature of mass fandom. In this
context there is an over-intellectualized lifelessness to such efforts.
In the midst of so much motionless and silent imagery, it is exciting
to encounter one of the handful of film and video clips in the
exhibition. One showing Bjork singing and dancing with infectious
abandon on the back of a truck borders on the transcendental.
Photographs of deities can have totemic value, but nothing captures
the spirit of rock 'n' roll like video.
--
"Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present"
continues through Jan. 31 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern
Parkway, at Prospect Park; (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.
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Rock Music Photos Spotlighted At Brooklyn Museum Exhibit
http://www.brooklyneagle.com/categories/category.php?category_id=12&id=31555
10-27-2009
From Elvis in 1955 to The Clash's London Calling
EASTERN PARKWAY It's time to rock out, Brooklyn! On Oct. 30, the
Brooklyn Museum will be opening the new exhibit, "Who Shot Rock &
Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present" the first major
museum exhibition to acknowledge photographers for their creative and
collaborative role in the history of rock and roll.
The exhibition features approximately 175 works by 105 photographers,
with many rare and never-before-exhibited photographs.
From its earliest days, rock and roll was captured in photographs
that personalized and frequently eroticized the musicians. The
exhibit proffers that photographers were handmaidens to the
rock-and-roll revolution, and their work communicates the social and
cultural transformations that rock helped bring about from the 1950s
to the present.
Among the works on view are such iconic images as William "Red"
Robertson's erotic 1955 photo of a pelvis-thrusting Elvis Presley,
which appeared on his first album; The Clash's London Calling album
cover by Pennie Smith depicting Paul Simonon smashing his Fender bass
guitar; the contact sheet of Bob Gruen's portrait of John Lennon in a
sleeveless New York City T-shirt; Don Hunstein's photograph of Bob
Dylan walking with his girlfriend Suze Rotolo down a snowy Greenwich
Village street; David LaChapelle's image of Lil' Kim as a bikini-clad
cop; and Anton Corbijn's shoot of U2 for their Joshua Tree album.
The exhibition will also feature photographs by Diane Arbus, Annie
Leibovitz, Woodstock photographer Barry Feinstein, Jim Marshall, Ryan
McGinley, Linda McCartney, Mark Seliger and Albert Watson.
Most of the photographs in the exhibition were uncovered in the
photographers' own files. Rarely, if never-exhibited, pictures
include a 1963 photograph by Philip Townsend of the Rolling Stones;
an image of James Brown surrounded by female fans shot by actor
Dennis Hopper; the working photographs and album cover by Jean-Paul
Goude of Grace Jones for Island Life; the full sequence of
never-before-exhibited photographs by Ed Caraeff of Jimi Hendrix at
the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967; the 1976 photograph by Roberta
Bayley used on the Ramones' first album; Amy Winehouse on her wedding
day by Max Vadukul, and many others.
The exhibit has been curated by photographic historian and author
Gail Buckland, and will be organized in six sections: images taken
behind the scenes; snapshots of young musicians at the beginning of
their careers; photographs of live performances that display the
energy of the bands on stage; images of the crowds and fans;
portraits that go beyond the surface and celebrity of the musicians;
and conceptual images and album covers highlighting the creative and
collaborative efforts between the image makers and the subjects.
The exhibition, which will be accompanied by a fully illustrated book
published by Alfred A. Knopf, will also include music videos by the
artists featured, an 80-image slide show by Henry Diltz, and a
rock-and-roll chronology made from actual album covers.
--
"Who Shot Rock & Roll" will be on display through Jan. 31, 2010. The
Brooklyn Museum is at 200 Eastern Parkway, off the Eastern Parkway
stop of the 2/3 train. www.brooklynmuseum.org.
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