Before rock and roll became cliché, it had many handmaidens. Among the most willing were the professional photographers who played a collaborative role in pushing through the societal changes that rock and roll demanded.
From frenetic performance photographs with light and line acutely defined to private, near-voyeuristic moments, rock photographers created an art form as unique as the times they documented.
While the works of individual photographers have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other prestigious institutions, the genre itself has never been accorded an overview in a major museum. Viewed in context with other genres that have made the transition from commercial photography to art photography, it is time for rock and roll to be accepted into the pantheon.
That is the motivation behind the exhibition, “Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present,” on view through January 31 at the Brooklyn Museum.
“It is not the subject that makes art photography but the photographer’s ability to communicate and express and explore,” photographic historian and author of a book by the same title, Gail Buckland, explained.
Music alone, Buckland believes, could not create the revolution. “It was a bilateral evolution of music and pictures. The photos spread the musicians’ images, showed people what to wear, how to cut their hair.”
Clearly, before MTV, fans identified with photographs on album covers, in Rolling Stone and Creem magazines. When rock and roll made the covers of Time and Life , the establishment went into shock. Whether embracing it or preaching against it, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind of what rock and roll looked like. From the first shot of Elvis at work, taken by a commercial photographer in Florida named William V. “Red” Robertson, there was a rhythm, a motion to the stills that had not been seen before. Of course, part of the reason is that no rocker prior to Elvis commanded the stage the way he did or was photographed as often.
Don Huntein’s 1963 photo of Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo walking arm in arm on a snowy Greenwich Village Street, a photo from the album cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, resonates with intimacy and promise even today.
That is the nature of rock and roll photography. It takes you behind the scenes, personalizes the stars, gives you a mosh pit view of the band. The only way to get closer is to be on stage with the band.
Which is why, as Buckland stated, “Who Shot Rock & Roll” is “an exhibition that is accessible without diminishing the scholarship or curatorial work.”
When Buckland, who has authored 12 books on photography, talks about the “greats” among rock and roll photographers, she is not generalizing. Ernest Withers, whose Civil Rights movement photos alerted a nation to change, was there to capture Ike and Tina Turner at Club Paradise in 1952. Richard Avedon was the one to see the Beatles as individuals in haute arte portraits. Diane Arbus caught James Brown at home in Queens, his hair in curlers. Annie Leibovitz began her career as a rock photographer for Rolling Stone.
The list goes on, just like the beat.
When the “three-song shoot” made it necessary for photographers to leave just about the time the band started to sweat and makeup began to run, many photographers dropped out of the scene. Others found that when the stylists took over, authenticity went out. Rock and roll was no longer fun; it was fashion.
For the most part, the freelancers and staff photographers who came of age with rock and roll have gone on to have successful careers as commercial photographers, graphic designers, directors, filmmakers.
The photographs and album covers in the exhibit do not attempt to provide technical insights into the photographer’s craft. Rather they showcase the components that make a photo work. “It’s not easy to photograph someone on stage, to stare into the lights and see the line,” Buckland explained. The same holds for photographing crowd scenes, of which there are many in the exhibit. These, Buckland said, are like great historical paintings †anguished faces, bodies thrusting against one another.
For Buckland, the only way to understand a photographer is to visit his or her studio. In researching the exhibit, she personally selected pictures from the files of photographers on at least two continents. By the time she sat down with Matthew Yokobosky, curator and exhibition designer at the Brooklyn Museum, she had 400 to 500 photos. Together they selected 175 works by 105 photographers, including some never before seen, such as Ed Caraeff’s Jimi Hendrix sequence from the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.
Inherent in the photographs are both tenacity and creativity. For instance, of her famous portrait of Hendrix in feathers, photographer Elaine Mayes has said, “It was nearly impossible for me to photograph Jimi during the performance. I was surrounded by taller photographers and could barely see the stage. Still, I managed to capture this quiet moment.”
Rarely was photography as easy as working with the punk vocalist Debbie Harry, who Roberta Bayley has said “gives you the picture. She just looks at the camera and looks amazing.” Charles Peterson, who photographed the Grunge scene, learned to survive the mosh pit, learned to fall with his camera and learned to strong-arm someone and still come out unscathed. “Still,” he has said, “even taking pictures from the pit, if the composition didn’t work out, I didn’t consider it a good photo.”
Shock rock imagery was especially prevalent on album covers. Here, graphic designers and photographers had a palette with room for exploration. It is also one of the places that color was wanted. The albums themselves became vehicles that brought the band closer to fans. People looked at the covers, read the liner notes.
Among the covers in the exhibit are Blind Faith’s first album. Controversial then, historic now, it was conceived by Bob Seideman at a time when the band had not yet named itself. Seideman decided on the image of a spaceship to represent human achievement. To carry it into the future on “‘blind faith,” he envisioned a girl, “as young as Shakespeare’s Juliet.” The spaceship was made by Mick Milligan, a jeweler at the Royal College of Art. The girl he found was 11 years old. Seideman photographed her naked holding the spaceship. The record company had apoplexy. The image was doomed †until Eric Clapton said he wanted to run with it. Even then, a lot of stores did not want to carry it.
As with most art photography exhibitions, Buckland wanted to include as many vintage prints as possible. The rub came when she found that photographers did not always have the prints. They had sent them off to magazines or newspapers and not thought about them again. They did have negatives or a more recent print, so both recent and new prints are included. Most are black and white 8-by-10s, the publishing standard for 35mm work.
The exhibition also includes music videos by artists featured in the exhibition, as well as an 80-image slide show by Henry Diltz, founder of the Modern Jazz Quartet and visual historian of rock. Diltz, who began his career with a $20 second-hand Japanese camera and is known for his shots of The Lovin’ Spoonful, The Doors and Woodstock, has a quote on his website that pretty much deromanticizes the role of rock photographer. “I’m the drummer, you’re the photographer. It’s as simple as that.” ⁒ingo Starr.
“Who Shot Rock & Roll” is organized in six sections. There are images taken from behind the scenes, snapshots of musicians at the beginning of their careers, photographs of live performances, images of the fans, portraits that go beyond the surface and the celebrity and conceptual images and album covers and collaborative efforts between the image makers and the subjects.
Buckland’s fully illustrated book titled Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present, published by Knopf, accompanies the exhibition.
If the subject matter drives you to the Brooklyn Museum, you will be pleasantly surprised by the artistry involved. The relationship between camera and memory, Susan Sontag reminded us, is to enhance our recall. “Who Shot Rock & Roll” gives you the opportunity to remember †finally remember †and put yet another battered chestnut to rest.
The Brooklyn Museum is at 200 Eastern Parkway. For information, 718-638-5000 or www.brooklynmuseum.org .
