Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present

30/10/2009

Who Shot Rock & Roll is 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. From its earliest days, rock and roll was captured in photographs that personalized, and frequently eroticized, the musicians, creating a visual identity for the genre. The photographers were handmaidens to the rock-and-roll revolution, and their images communicate the social and cultural transformations that rock has fostered since the1950s. The exhibition is in six sections: rare and revealing images taken behind the scenes; tender snapshots of young musicians at the beginnings of their careers; exhilarating photographs of live performances that display the energy, passion, style, and sex appeal of the band on stage; powerful images of the crowds and fans that are often evocative of historic paintings; portraits revealing the soul and creativity, rather than the surface and celebrity, of the musicians; and conceptual images and album covers highlighting the collaborative efforts between the image makers and the musicians.

Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present is organized by the Brooklyn Museum with guest curator Gail Buckland.

Rock 'n' roll isn't just a sound.
It's a look.

What stars wear, how they hold their bodies, what they project with their eyes, creates a style with as much movement and meaning as the music itself.

A great rock 'n' roll photograph freezes that for all time. Yet seldom do such shots get the display they deserve. A bracing corrective will arrive on Oct. 29, when the Brooklyn Museum opens its show "Who Shot Rock 'n' Roll," one of the largest, most serious - and also most fun - displays of rock photography ever presented.

"When musicians speak honestly, they'll tell you that their relationship with the camera has enormous power," says the show's curator, Gail Buckland. "They know they need it."

Which explains the special intimacy between photographer and star. "There's a willingness to work together to create something great," says Buckland. "If you look at Anton Corbijn's photographs of U2, it's not celebrity photography. There's a real attempt to get past the veneer and say something."

Corbijn's U2 shots in the American desert make them look like sculptures, or pieces of architecture, underscoring the band's outsized ambition. Other shots -like a live snap of a ravenous Johnny Rotten at the peak of punk, or Amy Winehouse snaking her hands down her pants in a Miami hotel room - bring us right inside the stars' psyches. "The Amy Winehouse picture is about the tension of 'How far do you go? How much do you reveal?,'" Buckland says.

The show, which runs through Jan. 31, comes complete with a like-named book, featuring more than 175 classic shots, from Johnny Cash flipping the bird to the camera at a San Quentin concert, to Tupac Shakur playing with the image of the male African-American outlaw.

The show itself has a multimedia component. It will feature videos of the photographers talking about their work, live bands and a soundtrack written by Blondie's Chris Stein.

The exhibit breaks into six sections, including "Starting Out," which captures the stars before they perfected their pose, "Behind the Scenes," which pulls back the curtain on the backstage action, and "Fans and the Crowd," stressing the relationship between star and audience. "When you see a face in the crowd there's almost a transcendental quality to it," Buckland says. "We recognize it and identify with it."

Of course, given the subject matter, the show also features plenty of sex. "The phrase 'rocking and rolling' originally meant sex," Buckland laughs. "This really is a turn-on."

jfarber@nydailynews.com

Location: 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York 11238-6052

Telephone: (718) 638-5000; TTY: (718) 399-8440

Admission: Suggested Contribution: $10; Students with Valid ID: $6; Adults 62 and over: $6; Members: Free; Children under 12: Free

Hours: Wednesday-Friday: 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Get detailed hours

Subway: 2

Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum Get detailed directions

<< Back