Icon: Music Through the Lens, episode 5: “On the Wall” (Cheese Film and Video, Eagle Rock Productions, Mercury, PBS, 2020)

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

Last night at 10 p.m. I switched off the rather depressing news shows on MS-NBC to watch the next-to-last episode in the oddball British series, originally aired there last November and now getting its U.S. debut on PBS, awkwardly called Icon: Music Through the Lens. The show is about music photography in general and rock music photography in particular – there have been a few explorations of rap photography and even one odd account of an early collaboration between rock star Tina Weymouth and Grandmaster Flash, one of the early rappers who emerged and did socially conscious material (he and the group Public Enemy represent a “road not taken” for rap that would have dealt in an emphatic but positive way with American racism and its history; instead it got derailed by the “gangstas” into mindless and oppressive celebrations of murder, rape, Queer-bashing and capitalist exploitation); they were brought together for a photo shoot by a New York music magazine that was printing on newsprint and using the same quarter-fold format as the early Rolling Stone, and as a result of their meeting on a photo shoot Weymouth and Flash actually collaborated on a song – he took a sample of one of her earlier records and they built a piece on it together – that became a hit.

But this episode, called “On the Wall,” mostly focused on the gradual evolution of a fine-art market for rock photography and the way it eventually fitted into the fine-art world of limited editions and deliberately created scarcity. Photography has always had to struggle to get accepted as “art” in the sense of the infrastructure that sells paintings, sculptures and handmade prints. One history of photography I read indicated that Louis Daguerre, whose involvements before he invented his photographic system had been in paintings and so-called “dioramas” (shows that involved the elaborate real-time manipulation of objects to tell stories in three dimensions), had actually regarded it as an asset that his process generated a positive print that could not be duplicated. But that wasn’t the process that survived and prospered: instead the standard for photography through most of the late 19th century (until George Eastman invented celluloid film and built the Eastman Kodak company on it) was so-called wet-plate negatives. These involved coating a sheet of glass with photo-sensitive chemicals, exposing them in a camera and developing them. Aside from the fragility of glass negatives, the real drawback of this process was that the plates had to be used for photography immediately after they were coated, and developed immediately after the picture was taken. I’ve seen pictures of the battle wagons with which Matthew Brady, Alexander Gardner and the other photographers of the U.S. Civil War traveled with the Union army: they needed their own wagon not only to store the chemicals but to coat the plates just before use and develop them immediately afterwards.

But glass-plate photography at least produced “negatives” in the modern sense, permanent (more or less) objects that could be used to make positive prints over and over again. I think it’s the ease with which a photographic image could be reproduced, and with little or no loss in quality – the 5,001st print off a wet-plate glass negative would look pretty much the same as the first – as well as the sense that photography was too “easy” (instead of elaborately drafting an image and applying paint to a canvas, or carving wood or stone or casting carefully molded metal to make a sculpture, it seemed that all the photographer had to do was point a camera at something and press a button) that made it so difficult for photographers to convince the fine-art world that they were artists, not craftspeople, and their work should be exhibited alongside paintings, sculptures and prints. As this show describes, people who took photographs of popular musicians – especially of popular musicians while actually performing – were considered low men (and women) on the totem pole of professional photographers. Even as other kinds of photographers who were creating the kinds of images previously reserved for painters – formal portraits, still lifes and landscapes – got a grudging degree of acceptance, photographers who shot musical performances weren’t really accepted as “artists” because of the sheer randomness of their work. Throughout this series, the photographers being interviewed have recalled leaving a concert where they didn’t know until they actually developed their pictures whether they had got anything useful or not. It was all in the luck of the draw – did they happen to hit the shutter button at the moment the musician was doing something visually interesting that would create the all-important iconic image? One photographer interviewed in an early episode said, “If you see it in the viewfinder, you’ve missed it” – because in a performance, especially in a genre like rock music in which the musicians do a lot of moving around on stage, by the time you’ve noticed that potentially iconic image in your viewfinder, the musician has already moved and started doing something else, and you lost the photo in that split second between the time the musician was doing the thing you wanted to photograph and the time you clicked the shutter.

The show chronicled how a career path for music photographers to sell their works as fine art ultimately evolved: first you interest a publisher in putting out a coffee-table book of your best pictures, and then people buy the book and decide they want to buy direct prints of the photos in the book. (More than one photographer remembered starting out as kids by clipping out photos from music magazines and posting them on their bedroom walls – and have ended by selling prints of works they did for magazines and charging people large sums for original prints of the same kinds of photos they used to clip from magazines and hang on their walls.) Photographers have noted that they’ve created deliberately limited editions of their most famous pictures (though they didn’t specify how “limited” they keep the editions; art printmakers generally destroy or deface the plates after they’ve printed the limited edition, but I seriously doubt whether the photographers depicted here are destroying the negatives, especially since all too many talked about regarding the images they’ve created as a part of history that should be preserved for future generations.) The market for photos of 1960’s and 1970’s rock musicians seems, at least to me, to have arisen because enough people who lived through those times eventually made enough money to collect fine art, and they’ve chosen to collect art objects through which they can relive their youth – which makes me wonder what the market for pics of the Beatles or the Stones or Hendrix is going to be like when all the people who were around when those bands were active have themselves passed on. (There’s probably still a market for original prints of Paganini – a musician I’ve often called “the Jimi Hendrix of the 19th century” because he was visually flamboyant, a master showman, extended the technical boundaries of his instrument, and set the seal on his legend by dying young – but they have to come with a lot of explanation of who Paganini was and why he was important.)

As Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers (or whatever the generation just after ours is called these days) have grown older and at least some of them (though not me!) have become relatively affluent, they’ve created a market for items that were considered disposable when they were first created (a number of the photographers interviewed here recalled putting all their original black-and-white negatives and color slides in shoeboxes and storing them in the 1980’s – and only recently taking them out again to look for images they can resell and make money on). There were also discussions about the copyright laws and how they’ve worked both for and against original photographers (like the musicians themselves, the photographers often signed their rights away for small sums “in the day” and now realize they gave up potential gold mines), and two fascinating stories about the interchange between photographers and artists. One man recalled photographing Ray Charles in performance at San Francisco State University, figuring he could get close enough for the image he wanted and Charles wouldn’t notice because he was blind – but somehow Charles did notice, stopped the performance and embarrassed the hell out of the guy by telling the audience, “I came here to play music, not to be photographed.” Another photographer recalled going to a Miles Davis concert in Copenhagen and being in the photo pit alongside another photographer, a fully professional one who came out with scads of equipment, including cameras equipped with motor drives so he could hold down the shutter and take photos again and again (the photographic equivalent of a machine gun). He started using this machine while Miles was playing a quiet solo with his mute on, and Miles chewed out the man and had him thrown out. Then he turned to the photographer who was telling the story, and who had just one simple, unobtrusive camera with a conventional drive and shooting by natural light, and said, “You can stay.”