Hail, Hail Rock and Rock Photography

Elvis by Alfred Wertheimer

 One of the unexpected benefits that came out of the opening of the Rock and Rolling Hall of Fame in 1995 was a flurry of research on--and growing appreciation of--rock-and-roll photographers. The new museum began creating a collection of images, many of which were featured in a special 1996 issue of the photo magazine I used to edit. Since then, galleries and museums have continued unearthing and celebrating the genre. The Govinda Gallery in Washington, D.C. has been at the center of many rock-photo exhibitions, including a new show at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C. It's called "Elvis at 21," and it features 56 images of The King before he was the The King, all taken by Alfred Werthheimer, most of them now iconic. There is also a new book out from Steidl called A Star Is Born: Photography and Rock that is a fairly comprehensive survey of the photographers who documented the world of rock over the past half century or so. This all follows up on the 2009 exhibition called "Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955-Present" at the Brooklyn Museum, which curated by one of my favorite photo historians, Gail Buckland. (There was an accompanying book from Random House.)

Access in Everything: Elvis by Wertheimer

Not coincidentally, the Rock and Roll Museum came about just as baby boomers started to get old enough to get some perspective on their misspent youth and the music that provided its soundtrack. As for rock photography, it was only a matter of time before savvy curators and publishers focused on photographers like Annie Leibovitz, Mark Seliger, Jim Marshall, Daniel Kramer, and, of course, Wertheimer. Elvis remains the most compelling figure in rock, at least to me, and Wertheimer's images continuing to be endlessly intriguing. He was hired in 1956 by RCA Victor records to shoot promotional pictures of the up-and-coming performer and was smart enough to see that the kid was kind of magnetic and might have a future. So he tagged along with Elvis on tour and produced deeply intimate, introspective images.

 Amy Winehouse by Max Vadukul, 2007 from "Who Shot Rock"

The full access Wertheimer had with Elvis really set the stage for much of the great rock photography that would follow. In 1977, Leibovitz went on tour with the Rolling Stones and produced images every bit as intimate--some painfully so. But that was about when it all ended: By the 1980s, labels and performers stopped granting that kind of access, and the art of rock photography changed as photographers like Leibovitz, Seliger, and Albert Watson perfected a refined and high-concept style of rock portraiture that elevated turned performers into icons. 

LL Cool J by Albert Watson, 1992

The Art of Bullfighting

 If you're going to talk about bullfighting and art, I suppose you'd better start with Hemingway, right? All that Death in the Afternoon stuff equating writing with bullfighting. "All stories, if continued far enough, end in death," he said. More to the point: "Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor."

Now that we've have that out of the way, we can go on to James Hill's pictures of bullfighting, which were highlighted last week on the New York Times's Lens blog. I met James several years ago at a photography workshop, and really liked him right off the bat. He did a brilliant job covering the American invasion and takeover of Iraq in 2003 for the Times, and since has become the newspaper's contract photographer for Europe, based at one time and another in Moscow and Rome. Last year he made a series of images of bullfighting, and, like Hemingway, he addresses the sport of ritualized death as an artistic endeavor.

 Unlike Hemingway, Hill also approaches the subject with an honest degree of humor: "Bullfighting is very obviously from another era," he says to writer James Estrin. "If someone said to you today, 'Why don’t we start a contest where we put a bull and a man in a ring, and we give the man some colored capes and a sword, and maybe some other men on horses can come and help him, and the man should be dressed up in pink tights and a funny sort of colored suit with gold bits on?'—you would think the idea was mad."

 You have the sense in his pictures that he himself is working through an internal debate over the moral complexities represented by bullfighting. His pictures seem to flit through different thoughts--the colors, the pageantry, and the blood—as a photographic experiment. His pictures, like most pictures, invite a moral debate, with a clear understanding that morality is, like bullfighting, a risky business. Or as Hemingway put it: "Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts."

Remarkable Pictures, 2010, Part 2

Herewith, another ten images from the past year that, for one reason and another--mostly visual, sometimes historical, always personal--I particularly liked.

April 17, 2010

This is not a painting or a fine-art photo. It shows Tibetan monks through the heat waves and flames of a mass burial of victims of the earthquake that shook Yushu, Qinghai, China on April 14. PHOTO BY AP

November 16, 2010

Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta becomes the first living soldier since Vietnam to receive that Medal of Honor for action in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, during which he saved the lives to two friends. If Giunta's expression is solemn, the reason could be learned on this clip, made by photographer Tim Hetherington and writer Sebastian Junger as a followup to their remarkable film Restrepo. As I noted in a blog post, this picture doesn't tell the facts behind the medal, but it tells the meaning of the facts. PHOTO BY J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP

NOVEMBER 12, 2010

Dancers with illuminated hats performing at the opening ceremonies of the Asian Games. A spectacle of color. PHOTO BY NICOLAS ASFOURI/GETTY IMAGES

June 2, 2010

These pictures belong together, as cause and effect. It was just one of those days for Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galaragga, who pitched a perfect game until the ninth inning, when umpire Jim Joyce called the runner in the photo on top safe at first base, though the runner was out by a mile, but there was no turning back. The following day, Joyce was behind home plate when he took the Tiger lineup card from...Galaragga, who comforted the clearly emotional ump. Let's bring in instant replay so no umpire has to go through this again.


November 2, 2010

More baseball: This photo of  triumphant pitcher Tim Lincecum appeared on the front page of the New York Times's sports section the day the San Francisco Giants won their first World Series championship in 56 years. The headline: "Giants Once More." The paper hangs in my office now, because I've been a Giants fan six age six. When my wife, a Chicago Cubs fan, saw it, I felt obliged to say that the Giants's win proved anything was possible. "Not really," she replied. "You're right," I said.


January 23, 2010

 

Venus Williams took the court during the Australian Open in attention-getting attire. Indeed, she turned up at several big tournaments wearing...controversial clothing of her own design. Whether her line becomes a hit or not, we'll always have these pictures of one of the sport's greatest stars. PHOTO BY GETTY IMAGES/AFP

February 13, 2010

Ian Banner wipes out--I think that's the right term--during a surfing contest in Half Moon Bay, California. Oddly, it's the wave that impresses me here. PHOTO BY BEN MARGOT/AP

June 28, 2010

The world needed another picture of Marilyn Monroe, and it got it. This x-ray was made in 1954 at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Florida, where Marilyn was treated there for endometriosis. As I always suspected, she had a superb chest. As I noted in a blog post, the woman simply could not take a bad picture. A doctor in the hospital's radiological unit kept the images, then passed them on to his daughter, who decided to put them up for sale at an auction of Marilyn memorabilia in Las Vegas.

March 31, 2010

This is what a lava lake looks like. It's a beautiful thing if you know how to photograph it right. This picture of the lava lake of Mount Nyiragongo in Congo was photographed quite well, I think. PHOTO BY REBECCA BLACKWELL/AP


June 1, 2010

This marks the third time I've included this picture in my blog. I'll try to make it the last time, but who knows when I'll need to talk about the visual allure of sinkholes again? This sinkhole, which swallowed up an entire intersection of downtown Guatamala City, went down some 30 stories. I think it's my favorite picture of the year...it really unleashes the imagination. Last summer I wondered who one might find down at the bottom, in the outer regions of hell....Osama bin Laden? Professor Moriarty? Ernst Stavro Blofeld? Dick Cheney? Just think what we may find out in 2011.

Remarkable Pictures, 2010, Part 1

Here's a purely personal collection of remarkable images from 2010. I came up with my list by pinching pictures from other end-of-year photo compilations, and by reviewing the past 12 months of this very blog. This is not a review of the biggest news events of the year—the choices are based on the effect the images had on me. So here's my pictorial trip down memory lane, presented in no particular chronological order:

October 10, 2010

The man in the wheelbarrow, killed during a missile strike in Kadahar Province, Afghanistan, was suspected of being a Taliban fighter who had placed IEDs. A soldier from the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division searches one of the dead man's associates. PHOTO FROM AP.

FEBRUARY 13, 2010

A Marine protects an Afghan man and his child after Taliban open fire on the town of Marjah in Helmand Province. PHOTO BY GORAN TOMASEVIC/REUTERS

January 14, 2010

The dust-covered body of a man killed in the earthquake that devastated Haiti lies on a sidewalk in Port-au-Prince. PHOTO BY DAMON WINTER/NEW YORK TIMES


November 8, 2010

Ash from the eruption of Mount Merapi on Java island in Indonesian covers a corn field. It's a color picture. PHOTO BY AP

February 13, 2010

NASA's Cassini spacecraft took this picture Mimas, one of Saturn's moons, from a distance of 70,000 kilometers away. PHOTO BY NASA/JPL/SSI


MAY 6, 2010

The Gulf of Mexico after the the BP oil disaster. PHOTO BY RICHARD PERRY/ NEW YORK TIMES

May 12, 2010

After in inconclusive election, Conservatives and Social Democrats joined forces to form a new British government. Here, the new Prime Minister, David Cameron, and the new Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, pose as mirror images of each other. PHOTO BY MATT CARDY/GETTY IMAGES

September 2, 2010

In coming up with the high concept for this Rolling Stone cover shot, photographer Matthew Rolston simply thought, "Oh, True Blood...naked, and covered in blood." My pick for the best mag cover of the year. PHOTO BY MATTHEW ROLSTON


MARCH 31, 2010

A penitent from one of the many processions that take place in Seville, Spain during Easter Holy Week. PHOTO BY EMILIO MORENATTI/AP

MAY 5, 2010

Back in May the Tea Party was still a kind of fringy movement that the media was trying to figure out. At that point, the party mostly just staged rallies in which people carried signs about impending losses of freedom. The Huffington Post ran an article about the "10 Most Offensive Tea Party Signs," which included this one. PHOTO BY MATTHIEU YOUNG.

Holiday Gift Number Two: A Very Hilton Christmas

Some of those families who are lucky enough to be getting away to warm places this holiday will be taking photos. Here is one typical family: The Hiltons! I love this picture. When I first saw it, I thought it was some kind of Photoshopped thing, with three separate shots of the same couple all combined into one frame. But no! On the left, you see Paris Hilton and her boyfriend Cy Waits; in the middle are Paris's parents, Rick and Kathy, and on the right is sister Nicky Hilton with her boyfriend, David Katzenberg. Off in the distance is a guy in a kayak...The picture is from the Flynet agency.

A Merry Nazi Christmas

Life.com pulled from the late picture magazine's archives a number ridiculously intriguing photos of Adolf Hitler and company celebrating a very Waffen-SS Christmas. The pictures, one or two of which were published in Life in bygone days, were taken by Hugo Jaeger, one of Hitler's personal photographers. This yuletide celebration took place in Munich on December 18, 1941--eleven days after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. As Life.com notes, "killing operations" at the Nazi's Chelmno death camp had begun less than two weeks before.

Herr Hitler looks a little glum in the photo above. In fact, this view of the celebration makes it look like one of the dreariest office Christmas parties ever thrown. The photo below shows us, however, that the Nazi's typically went for big drama with stage setting. The Lowenbraukeller--yes, the party was held in a beer hall--is garnished with huge swastikas, huge trees, and streamers of tinsel.

The SS soldiers who manned the steins that night seem to be having a good time. As the website points out, the Nazis originally wanted to take religion out of the holiday--they had a plan (they always had a plan) to rig up a celebration harking back to the old pagan days. Something like a Fascist Festivus, or something like that, but the Volk wanted their Christmas.

It just so happens that I've been reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich recently, and these images help shade detail into the narrative. The images remind us how real history really was.

Snowy Europe: My Favorite Photo

I found this photo of snow-covered Florence, Italy on the New York Times's "Lens" blog. It was taken by Maurizio Degl'Innocenti for the European Photo Agency.

Why it's my favorite picture of the snowfall that has shut down Europe over the past few days should be fairly obvious: The whites and the blacks and the reds, the blanketed streets--photos are silent, of course, but you can almost hear the quiet in this shot. Someone else can explain exactly why snow dampens the sound of city streets; for me, it's just one of the best things in the world.

Why shouldn't these people be kissing? They're in Florence. They're not trapped in an airport in England, sleeping on a rolled-out foam mattress and eating god-knows-what. Congratulations to Mr. Degl'Innocenti and his editors for reminding me that natural disasters of this kind aren't always awful.