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It's only rock 'N' roll
The book also serves as a catalog for a traveling exhibit.
Frank Zappa, 1967. by Godlis and Jerry Schatzberg
By JAMES D. WATTS JR. World Scene Writer
Published: 11/8/2009 2:22 AM
Last Modified: 11/8/2009 4:10 AM
Richard Avedon — the one photographer in the book "Who Shot Rock & Roll" whose work is about as far removed from what "rock 'n' roll photography" means as can be imagined — summed up this tome perfectly.
"The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion," Avedon is quoted as saying in the text accompanying his 1961 portrait of the Everly Brothers. "There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth."
Avedon's shot of Phil and Don Everly — two pompadoured young men in dark suits and skinny ties, their expressions and the way they stand with faces turned away from each other — hints at the fraternal discord behind those heavenly harmonies.
Is that what was really going on when Avedon clicked the shutter that January day? Does it matter? It's only rock 'n' roll, after all, where one can be a star with little more going for him than an unusual look and a whole lot of attitude.
Rock 'n' roll has always been as much a visual art form as a musical one. Far too many performers' images — whether a hairstyle, a mode of dress, a lifestyle or an ever-shifting panoply of personae — sometimes overwhelm the music they create.
The great rock artists are the ones who strike the right balance between the artifice of their "image" and the presumed honesty of the music they make. They are usually helped by photographers who through close association
— or in some cases, sheer luck — manage to gain access to the lives of these performers.
"Who Shot Rock & Roll" is a supreme assemblage of some of the most iconic images of the second half of the 20th century, beginning with William "Red" Robertson's 1955 shot of Elvis Presley wailing away and thrashing an acoustic guitar.
This photo would become the cover of Presley's first album, whose imagery would be co-opted by the English band the Clash for its 1980 classic, "London Calling."
A lot of Presley is in this volume, most of it from 1955-56, when he was beginning to shake up not just the music charts but society as a whole. The book includes a number of Alfred Wertheimer photographs, including the famous series of Elvis kissing a girl in a Virginia theater stairwell that did as much to cement his "bad boy" image as any chorus of "Hound Dog" ever could.
There are a bunch of Beatles images, from Astrid Kirchherr's shots of the "Silver Beatles," the teenage, leather-jacketed five-piece band (with drummer Pete Best and Kirchherr's fiance, Stu Sutcliffe) who were scratching out a living in dives in Hanover, Germany, to Avedon's portraits from 1967 that make the Fab Four look a bit like actors in some minimalist version of "Hamlet."
Author Gail Buckland has gathered together works by famous photographers (Annie Leibovitz, Amy Arbus, Bob Gruen) along with images taken by band members and family members (Chris Stein of "Blondie," Linda McCartney, Pattie Boyd).
There are images that became album covers, like Don Hunstein's shot of Bob Dylan walking down a snow-crusted street with Suzy Rotolo on his arm for "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," or Anton Corbijn's image of U2 for "The Joshua Tree," or several of the surreal images created by Storm Thorgerson and Hipgnosis for artists like 10cc, Led Zeppelin, the Nice and the Mars Volta.
Buckland also includes images that show the effect some artists have on their fans: English bobbies struggling to hold back a horde of Beatles fans outside Buckingham; a group of young men fighting over shreds of a shirt the singer Morrissey doffed and tossed to the crowd; an aerial view of a Madonna concert at a stadium; French fans of New Kids on the Block crouching in ambush in a Paris hotel corridor.
Buckland writes in the introduction that she originally wanted to do just a book on rock photography, but that idea soon grew into an exhibit, of which the book has become the catalog.
The exhibit opened last month at the Brooklyn Museum and will travel to museums in Massachusetts, Tennessee, Ohio and South Carolina. The book serves as the catalog for what has been billed as "the first major museum exhibition on rock and roll to put photographers in the foreground, acknowledging their creative and collaborative role in the history of rock music."
Exhibit
One photographer not represented
in “Who Shot Rock &
Roll,” Nancy Lee Andrews, has
a show of her photographs,
drawn from her book “A Dose
of Rock and Roll,” on display
through the month of November
at the M.A. Doran Gallery,
3509 S. Peoria Ave.
James D. Watts Jr. 581-8478
james.watts@tulsaworld.com
By JAMES D. WATTS JR. World Scene Writer
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