Rock & Roll, I Thee Wed: "Who Shot Rock & Roll" at the Brooklyn Museum of Art

“The world, in truth, is a wedding.” –Erving Goffman


Chuck. Mick & Keith. John & Paul. Jimi. Patti. Madonna. Bjork. These names we know.

Annie. Philip. Richard. Gered. Judy. Amy. Stephane. These, somewhat more vague.

As intrinsic to the pull of rock star allure as the music itself are photographic images, or so the recent exhibition, Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, would lead a visitor to believe. While the exhibition notes call photography, the profession, “rock & roll’s handmaiden,” let’s take the metaphor one step further and label the images themselves, those which immortalize these singing, swaying, sweating, smoking, screaming figures, dressed in majestic rags, as the rock star’s true spouse. Not such a stretch, after all. Paul and Linda only literalize it (“My Love”: Linda McCartney’s shot of Paul’s deep eyes in the rearview mirror, as, seen from the back, he directs their car down a quiet London street). Rock stars are people married to their own image. Like Pan and his shadow.

And, O, what hath they begot? After a generation or two: us. Social networking bunnies. No matter how jumbled our thoughts on love, we’ll never forget their names, those of our rock & roll icons. From the slowest creeping of the clock in our parents’ sinking homes, they drew us forth to what is bright and exciting and of NOW.

Yes, and the creators of these images, with their own names freshly etched on the walls of a fine art museum, at last receiving their due—some casual photographers, some committed, some company hands, some artists in their own right: Leibovitz, Townsend, Avedon, Mankowitz, Linn, Arbus, Sednaoui, to list a few.

Organized under six headings, the exhibition ranged from images tentative and unguarded to polished and knowing: Starting Out, Fans & Crowds, Performance, Behind the Scenes, Constructing an Image and Portraits.

Is that George Harrison of The Beatles, in shades, enjoying a smoke, back to a barred gate against which a crowd of admirers press themselves, the sign above his left shoulder reading ‘WAY OUT’? Yes, viewer, it is. (Bob Whitaker, photographer, from the Fans & Crowds section, circa 1965.)

Is that Paul Simonon of The Clash, bent almost to the floor, bass guitar brandished primordially overhead, two hands on the neck, the lights from behind him throwing his shadow forward? Viewer, it is. (Pennie Smith, from Performance, circa 1979.)

Is that Patti Smith touching her cheek, a gesture of refinement—is she really there at all?—outside CBGBs in the East Village night of 1976? (Bleeker St. sign just a little down the way.) Viewer, yes. (Godlis, from Behind the Scenes.)

How many ways can a band—three figures… four… five… more?—arrange themselves in front of a camera, as in a police line-up where “all the suspects have attitude” (the exhibition notes again); how many contexts; outfits; hair-fashions? Kiss. The Yardbirds. The Stones. Those Beatles again… with some guy named Pete and another named Stuart… and where’s Ringo? “They were just discovering who they were,” said the latter photographer, Astrid Kirchherr, “and I think that [my] photos helped them make that discovery.”

Singing on video is that a bleached out David Bowie in powder blue jacket and red mullet, wearing eye-shadow and rouge on his cheeks, telling a story with the most precise gestures of the hand, blinks of the eye? Oh man! Look at those cavemen go/ It’s the freakiest show. (Mick Rock, from Portraits.)

And how is it that we, once under the wings of parents, drawing an understanding that an image must be struck in the world to announce our presence, to make our desires felt—as different! so different! from those who came before us—found these ideas of ourselves running into those at which we stared, during the slowest creeping hours, our stored peace let loose like the yellow from within the yolk?

Lloyd Shearer’s image of Elvis in 1956, head reclined against a hotel bed, eyes gone dreamy with languor, looking almost girlish in his otherworldliness: They screamed for him. They all screamed for him.

Before a series of images showing Jimi Hendrix on his knees, pouring kerosene on his prone guitar, then lighting it aflame (Ed Caraeff, the Monterey Pop Festival of 1967), a father and son paused.

The son looked up to his father and said: “He’s crazy!”

Responded the father: “No. That was his style.”


Jeff Price is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn. In 2009, he held the position of Associate Editor at Electric Literature (http://electricliterature.com/blog/). Contact him here: jt_price at hotmail dot com.

Tiananmen Square and The Iconic Image

What would Jeff Widener, a renowned photojournalist, say to the man whom his photograph immortalized? In the iconic image, the Chinese citizen, whose fate to this day is unknown, blocks the path of a procession of tanks in what remains a defining moment of the June 5th, 1989 Tiananmen Square aftermath. “I would ask him,” says Widener, “what finally carried him over the top emotionally? Had he lost a loved one in the military crackdown? Was it a planned case of defiance or had he just been broken down to the point that he no longer feared for his own personal safety?”

If not for the photographs, that of Widener along with the other journalists present that day, the man’s signal act of defiance might have been lost along with much else of the historical record, as the Chinese government sought to whitewash the fact of the six-week student-led protest, to propagate amnesia in the name of nationalism. But Widener happened to be there, one beat photographer among many, risking life and limb to capture events as they happened, and it was his image that the AP ultimately picked up, soon to be seared into minds around the globe.

Roger Cohen of the NY Times recently quoted Chinese researcher Shi Guoliang in the observation that, “students [at Beijing’s China Youth University for Political Sciences] don’t do sit-ins, they blog and use Twitter.” Faced with a vastly improved economic prognosis, Chinese youth twenty years later seem content to keep their dissident thoughts anonymous on the margins of the internet. Yet the power of Widener’s image abides, one individual standing over and against the iron fist of oppression, in a country where individualism has no ostensible platform.

Will that change? “You will see such images used more and more to make political statements as well as increase social awareness for all of us as humans,” says Widener. In ways obvious and subtle. Widener considers an image of Pope John Paul II stifling a yawn during a ceremony at St. George’s Cathedral in London, to be among his most revealing, “the human side of a great man.”

Great man or no, the anonymous Chinese citizen may have made a more resonant statement. As of April 29, 2009, The National reports that government censorship of English language accounts of the 1989 Tiananmen protests have been eased for the first time in mainland China.

About Jeff Price: Price is a New York based writer whose professional works focus on culture, politics and the big city lifestyle.