Linda McCartney: Life in Photographs
Phillips de Pury & Company, Howick Street, London 7th to 16th June 2011
Phillips de Pury & Company, 45 -47 Brook Street, London 28th June to 31st July 2011 (highlights)
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Linda Eastman got started by snapping a Rolling Stones promotional party in her native New York in 1966. She quickly established herself, and in May 1968 she became the first female “Rolling Stone†magazine cover photographer, only a few days prior to meeting Paul McCartney. This exhibition of around 25 photographs coincides with the release of a wider retrospective in book form, and includes professional music work, as well as personal and family pictures.
Musical highlights include a resplendently spot-lit, white-suited Jimi Hendrix, isolated on black, serenely at one with his guitar in mid-performance, surely a superior image to some of the Hendrix photographs currently sold in great numbers by other more illustrious contemporaries. That said, the music pictures in the show tend towards the safer, or more commercial choices, and for me don’t necessarily show the young photographer at her very best: the frenetically kinetic BB King you’ll only find in the book is as good a music photograph as you’ll find anywhere. Similarly, the exhibition picture of a happy Paul and John working on a song is easily bested by the book’s much grainier and edgier image of just their smiling faces. But perhaps this is an unfair criticism - this is a commercial exhibition after all.
Some of the personal work is also of a very high standard. For example, 1982’s “Paul, Stella and James†offers pleasing geometry, surreal tension, decisive moment dynamism; and hints at complex inter-relationships between the subjects. Not bad for a family snap. My personal favourite, though, has to be “McCartney album cover, Scotland 1970â€: not only because it is a wonderfully idiosyncratic portrait of a relaxed, happy father with his baby daughter in his jacket pocket; and not only because it has appealing elemental qualities, with the light blue of the sky, the deep blue of the sea, the lush green of the land, and the golden glow of the magic hour sun; but also because, in a cheesy “soundtrack of our lives†way, I grew up looking at this picture every time I pulled the album out of my own family’s record collection. Paul McCartney may be one of the most significant cultural figures of the entire photographic age, but Linda has made her contribution to the culture too.
While her music photography doesn’t approach the range or depth of, say, Roy DeCarava’s, and her family pictures don’t possess the gravity or piquancy of, say, Sally Mann’s or Larry Sultan’s, Linda McCartney nonetheless produced some very fine photographs in both arenas, something I hadn’t previously fully appreciated. I’d certainly recommend checking out the show, not least because the technical standard of presentation in the airy Howick Street space was nothing short of vertiginous. The conventional prints were so exquisitely lit they manifested a lightbox-like luminescence, and the printing itself was extraordinary, with prints of acceptable quality of up to ten feet tall ostensibly produced traditionally from smaller-format film stock. Open to the public and free of charge, this was a welcome change from one or two of the overly long and poorly presented special exhibitions I (and many thousands of others) have recently been charged a small fortune to see in our hallowed public galleries.