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The Times:Linda McCartney's Lives Through A LensA new exhibition of her black-and-white photographs reveals that Linda McCartney was much more than just a Beatle wife
Joanna Pitman
There are three self-portraits of Linda McCartney in the retrospective of her work opening tomorrow at the James Hyman Gallery in Savile Row. The 25 other photographs show us for the first time the impressive range of her black-and-white work and give us glimpses of the private world of the McCartney clan, the rock stars she photographed in the 1960s and the artists and friends whose company she and Paul enjoyed.
If you go along to this exhibition expecting to find the mediocre work of the wife of a rock star you'll be surprised - here McCartney emerges as a dedicated, accomplished photographer.
One of the self-portraits overshadows the whole lot. Taken in late 1997, a few months before she died, Linda is seen standing in the background of a mirrored reflection, her slim, slightly blurred figure is dressed in black, her hair is short, and her face staring calmly forward into the lens. Visible in the foreground is an empty sofa, a cast of William Blake's death mask and a crack in the mirror's surface that has been patched up with Sellotape.
The picture was taken in Francis Bacon's bedroom in the studio where he had lived and worked up until his death in 1992. On the day it was taken, McCartney had spent some time there with her children, larking about, exploring the paint-spattered spaces in which he had worked. At some point, she must have crept away on her own into his bedroom and set up this shot. The symbolism of death is everywhere, and Linda is in among it, still there but only just.
The picture hits very hard and Hyman has wisely given it a wall to itself because it doesn't sit easily among her other photographs. The rest of the exhibition shows the world through Linda's lens as a place composed of antics and ideas, musicians and children, coquetry, romance, languor and dreams. Hers was a world in which she found amusing suspensions of gravity and an abundance of human beauty, her perception of it now and again touching, now and again amusing, in an elegiac sort of way.
Her earliest work was portraits of rock stars taken in the 1960s, when she worked as a photographer for Rolling Stone magazine. These are the pictures that she was known for (as Linda Eastman) before she met Paul. Now 40 years old, they have gained force with the years, having history in tow, in the clothes, the poses and the attitudes. There is Janis Joplin looking almost Victorian in a black ruffle-necked blouse; and Mick Jagger in a striped blazer, turning towards Linda, his face half visible between parted curtains.
These were the counter-culture heroes, men and women who had a stake in looking scandalous, deadbeat and bizarre. But when Linda took their photographs she made them look normal - people rather like us, worried perhaps about their greying hair, their ageing parents. Simon and Garfunkel are seen rehearsing in 1966, singing at each other (they could equally be yelling at each other) before a background of microphones arranged like a cluster of clashing swords. John Lennon is captured during a rehearsal, his face turning to see something out of the frame, his face etched with worry.
More here:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article3797994.ece
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Topic: Times Review of Linda McCartney Photo Exhibition (Read 915 times)