Taking Shots

There was a time when concert photography was an art. Someone with a good camera, a trained eye and a passion for music would crawl to the front of a stage and plant himself there, waiting to capture something about a performer that would make for a moving portrait. Indeed, rock photography was an art form. And while today there are still top-notch photographers following bands—despite many of them being shuffled out of the pit in front of the stage after a measly three songs—what’s far more prevalent is the obnoxious glow of cell phone screens as fans spend entire concerts snapping their own photos to upload to Facebook, Flickr or a surplus of other sites. Plenty of people still appreciate actual rock photography (and probably enjoy actually watching a band instead of waving a piece of plastic in the air for an entire set), and New York is lucky enough to see new work from two of them this month.

The exhibit Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present opens Oct. 30 at the Brooklyn Museum as a companion to the book of the same name by Cooper Union photography professor Gail Buckland. The book and exhibit examine rock photography from The Beatles to Amy Winehouse, focusing not on the subject of the photos, but on the talent behind the camera.

“I’m a photographic historian, so putting names to images is something I’ve always done,” says Buckland, whose exhibit will open with a party and a live set from Blondie. “I’ve been in the field long enough that I know at different periods, different genres were brought into the pantheon. I remember when fashion photography was just in magazines and now it’s in museums. One area I thought had been ignored was an area where people had made some of the most iconic images in the world, and I felt strongly that I wanted to give a name and identity to people who made these photographs.”

And she does. The book and exhibit include the work of superstars like Annie Leibovitz and Mick Rock, but also the work of lesser-known shutterbugs like Michael Lavine, whose photo of Biggie Smalls in Cyprus Hills Cemetery is featured.

Although Lavine has worked extensively photographing hip-hop artists, he also released Grunge this month, a collection of his photos including shots from Seattle streets as well as pictures of the bands—Nirvana, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, Mudhoney, Beat Happening—that would come to define the 1990s sound.

As a student at Evergreen College in Olympia, Wash., Lavine began documenting the underground rock scene he was involved with—though he says he had no idea that it would blow up the way it did.

“We were this little community that existed underneath the mainstream,” explains Lavine, who now lives in Lower Manhattan. “And what’s fascinating for me is to experience how quickly and how close reality can be split. To be just a guy in a room hanging out at a show that really basically only a handful of people know about, and then to turn around a couple of years later and have the whole world interested is really a fascinating experience.

“You can’t predict these things,” he says. “And you don’t know when you’re in it and no one’s been able to manufacture it. It’s spontaneous and organic.”

Lavine says that while the proliferation of photo-sharing websites and technology for the masses has made rock photography less special in some ways, it might not always be that way. “People have been weakened and trained to expect less,” he explains. “‘Free’ is the logic and excuse they use, but 10 years from now we’ll look back and [the style of photography on those sites] will be really obvious and defining of a time period.”

Buckland agrees, pointing out that while everyone wants to take their own photos, the end result is a pile of images that nobody wants to see.

“I went to see Grace Jones recently, and I’m short, so I can’t see over anyone’s head. So I was sitting, and it was like the circus!” she says. “I thought it was part of the performance where everybody was waving these lights, but it was their cell phones. The number of pictures is exponentially greater now than at any time in history. I’ve looked through Spin and Rolling Stone and compilations of whomever—whatever band, if they’re big enough, they have a book—and there’s schlock thrown in with amazing pictures. The time has come for a collection that had integrity. I can defend every image [in Who Shot Rock and Roll]. The way to enter this experience is through looking at pictures because you love rock ’n’ roll. But my text is not about the music, [rather it] is about how photographers worked. As Jim Marshall once said, ‘Too much bullshit is written about music. Let the photograph be what you remember, not for its technique, but for its soul.’”