Icon: Music Through the Lens, episode 1: “On Camera” (Cinefromage, Mystery Studios, 2020; aired on PBS-TV, July 19, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 10 p.m. I watched a rather odd show on PBS: what was billed as the first of six episodes of a mini-series called ICON: Music Through the Lens, “On Camera,” about music photography. Like most shows about popular music’s history these days, it began with the Beatles – particularly with a famous photo (albeit one I don’t recall having seen before) of John Lennon posed above Paul McCartney in 1965 (when the Beatles were still trying to look pretty much the same – “just minor variations on a theme,” as Timothy Leary put it when he met them, citing the mystical power attributed in many myths to identical siblings). The only musician they mentioned who pre-dated the Beatles was Robert Johnson, of whom only one photo is known to exist: the one that appears on the complete boxed set of his records, taken in a studio in Memphis, Tennessee in 1935 (before he’d actually recorded) and looking like a typical young Black man of the period dressed in his “Sunday best.” Naturally they couldn’t resist citing the ridiculous myth that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to obtain his talent – though I’m not that big a fan of Robert Johnson and there are other blues musicians from that period, including Charley Patton and Robert Wilkins, who speak to me more. Surprisingly there wasn’t a segment on how Elvis Presley was photographed even though – more than most rockers of the 1950’s – his photos were a large part of defining his image.

The musicians they did cover included the Beatles (jointly and severally), the Rolling Stones, Madonna (there’s a fascinating early video clip of her doing a quite good song I didn’t recognize), Jimi Hendrix (particularly Geren Mankowitz’ famous photo of him in a 19th-century style military jacket that became iconic only after Hendrix’ death – I’ve already noted in these pages how the photos of the Jimi Hendrix Experience published during Hendrix’ lifetime were made to minimize the racial differences between the part African-American, part Native American Hendrix and his white British bandmates – the U.S. version of Are You Experienced tinted the group photo blue to make it as hard as possible to tell that one of these people was visibly not like the others) and some rap people I hadn’t the slightest interest in. My husband Charles came home during the segment on Snoop Dogg and wondered why on earth I was watching a show about him when I can’t stand virtually all rap, especially rap from the “gangsta” tradition that goes out of its way to glorify murder, rape, Queer-bashing and other crimes. Yes, I know there’s a tradition in Black music of celebrating the bad-ass (does the name “Stagolee” mean anything to you? Although there was a previous PBS documentary, American Epic, which suggested that the real-life prototype for Stagolee might have been white and the first recording of the song made by a white artist; I still love Elijah Wald’s comment in his book on Robert Johnson that on some late 1920’s and early 1930’s blues records we don’t know whether the artists were Black or white because, while the records exist, photos of the performers do not), but one of the things that leave me cold about rap is the way it goes out of its way to glorify anti-social behavior, as exemplified by how often the rap artists have been murdered – many times, like Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., by rival gangs to the ones they were affiliated with (and L.A. rapper Nipsey Hussle seems to have been killed precisely because he was trying to do a more positive sort of rap and donate his money to help the Black community, and the gangstas resented him for it and wanted to eliminate him).

The show suffered from at least some of the flaws I expected, including an attempt to glorify rock photography as an art form equivalent to rock itself – actually one constant of the story was how little time photographers get with rock artists and how often the artists are late showing up for a photographic session. One photographer who took a famous picture of Sinéad O’Connor at a table in front of a big picture window said they only did that shot because she hadn’t brought power cords to run her lights and so she had to look around O’Connor’s hotel room to find a spot where she could photograph her by available light. (O’Connor is one of those artists that’s become more famous for her eccentricities than her music, but in that photo she looks surprisingly normal.) The makers of this show (imdb.com credits Dick Carruthers as director but nobody as writers) tried to interview musicians as well as photographers, but they couldn’t land very many major names – the biggest music star they got to talk to was Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age, though they got two sons of legendary and now-deceased mega-stars who’ve pursued music careers of their own, Julian Lennon and Ziggy Marley). I must say I was amused by an anecdote from a photographer who did a shoot for Beyoncé back when she was still part of a group (Destiny’s Child) and still had a last name (Knowles), in which Beyoncé told him she was very concerned about how her ass would look on camera. When he told her he could light her to make her ass look smaller, she said she wanted the exact opposite: she wanted it to look bigger!

The strongest point they made was about the ways in which photos often define what people think about a solo artist or a band – Ziggy Marley pointed to a particularly famous casual photo of his dad (one of the few in which Bob Marley actually looked kempt – I remember seeing a photo of Marley with a group of people putting on his first British tour, in which he was opening for African-American singer Johnny Nash because Nash had had a lightly reggae-themed hit, “I Can See Clearly Now,” and Marley looked nothing like any of the other people in the photo, including any of the other Black people: Nash and his entourage were wearing nice shirts and slacks and had their hair done in impeccable Afros, while Marley was dressed in torn jeans and a casual shirt and sported his legendary dreads). The newest artist they depicted was Billie Eilish, who came to a photo session with various clothes she insisted on wearing – including a yellow something-or-other that was so billowing she literally had to be helped off the floor after she sat down on it. Actually, one of the things I like about Billie Eilish is her insistence on wearing baggy clothes because she does not want to project herself as a sex kitten by showing off her body the way most modern young female singers do – including Alessia Cara, the musical guest on the Stephen Colbert show Charles and I watched immediately afterwards. I like Alessia Cara (her song “Scars to Your Beautiful” won my heart the first time I heard it, even though she rather contradicted its message by licensing it for a fashion commercial) and her song on the Colbert show, “Sweet Dream,” was quite nice – but did she have to wear skin-tight red pants and wiggle her ass at the camera a lot?