Prototype Issue
Icons of Rock and the Imagination
By Nathaniel Page
(page 1 of 1)Photographer Lynn Goldsmith has been lionizing popular musicians with her camera for over 30 years. She gained exclusive access to myriad rock stars as a young woman and her photographs of them became famous on the backs of their subjects.
Her work has appeared on the covers of many important periodicals and she is considered mostly peerless in her field.
Her work, she says, “explores questions of identity through self portrayals,” appropriate since rock stars are constantly striving to cultivate a certain image of themselves through the media. Goldsmith apparently always assists in that effort.
Though some of the photos are slightly candid, they all portray caricatures. Bruce Springsteen, for instance, appears amidst a lot of hubcaps, looking solidly blue-collar.
There’s a posse shot of the Beastie Boys in front of a Brooklyn pizza joint, Ad-Rock threatening the lens with brass knuckles. The portraits are all exquisite in terms of composition, but of course lean heavily for context on the legends of those featured.
The most impressive portraits are the ones fully staged in studios. For these Goldsmith was able to construct a scene around the subject on her own creative impulses, and therefore added her own commentary on the subject and his or her identity.
Unfortunately she also included in the exhibit a lot of mosaics, vague images of a band or rocker made up of hundreds of photos of the band taken over several years, which are rather shallow in contrast.
The exhibit should be of supreme interest to those obsessed with famous musicians, and is worth seeing even for those who merely appreciate good photography.
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