This stunning assemblage of never-before-seen photos is a worthy addition to any rock fan’s library.
A large collection of concert photographs portrays a who’s who of 1980s rock ’n’ roll.
In 1983, budding photographer Stone (The Strange Birth, Short Life, and Sudden Death of Justice Girl, 2013) showed up at a Ramones concert intent on capturing the legendary punk band on film. When a security guard told him his equipment wasn’t welcome in the venue, he improvised, hiding his lens and camera body in his socks. Thus, a career as an “Outlaw Rock and Roll Photographer” was born. Over the next several years, he surreptitiously snapped photos of the B-52s, Duran Duran, R.E.M., and other iconic artists. A selection of that work is displayed in this impressive coffee-table book. The images—shot in both black and white and color—show musicians in the heat of performance. There’s a snarling, sweaty Joan Jett, a joyous Tom Petty, and Prince, soaring in the air midsplit. While some photos show an entire band on stage, the best (and majority) are surprisingly intimate images of a single performer, often isolated in a sea of black. A close-up of a shirtless Sting shows the Police frontman gazing out at the crowd like a Grecian god. In another, a pink-suited David Bowie performs, seemingly alone, on stage. While familiar pop stars dominate the work, Stone has included a few lesser-known acts, like Chequered Past, made up of ex-members of Blondie and the Sex Pistols, and Haven, “a perfectly fine band that never made it past the 8:00 p.m. slot on a Tuesday night at the Troubadour.” The author didn’t set out to document a particular scene, nor did he concentrate on a specific genre. In this pleasingly diverse collection, New Wavers Talking Heads share space with ’60s stalwarts the Grateful Dead and heavy-metal rockers like Ratt. A few brief essays from Stone provide context for some of the shots and explain his decision to give up rock photography. But for the most part, he wisely lets his powerful images speak for themselves.
This stunning assemblage of never-before-seen photos is a worthy addition to any rock fan’s library.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9898315-1-2
Page Count: 252
Publisher: For the Duration Press
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A fascinating, major work that will spark endless debates.
An epic cradle-to-grave biography of the king of pop art from Gopnik (co-author: Warhol Women, 2019), who served as chief art critic for the Washington Post and the art and design critic for Newsweek.
With a hoarder’s zeal, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) collected objects he liked until shopping bags filled entire rooms of his New York town house. Rising to equal that, Gopnik’s dictionary-sized biography has more than 7,000 endnotes in its e-book edition and drew on some 100,000 documents, including datebooks, tax returns, and letters to lovers and dealers. With the cooperation of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the author serves up fresh details about almost every aspect of Warhol’s life in an immensely enjoyable book that blends snappy writing with careful exegeses of the artist’s influences and techniques. Warhol exploded into view in his mid-40s with his pop art paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans and silkscreens of Elvis and Marilyn. However, fame didn’t banish lifelong anxieties heightened by an assassination attempt that left him so fearful he bought bulletproof eyeglasses. After the pop successes, Gopnik writes, Warhol’s life was shaped by a consuming desire “to climb back onto that cutting edge,” which led him to make experimental films, launch Interview magazine, and promote the Velvet Underground. At the same time, Warhol yearned “for fine, old-fashioned love and coupledom,” a desire thwarted by his shyness and his awkward stance toward his sexuality—“almost but never quite out,” as Gopnik puts it. Although insightful in its interpretations of Warhol’s art, this biography is sure to make waves with its easily challenged claims that Warhol revealed himself early on “as a true rival of all the greats who had come before” and that he and Picasso may now occupy “the top peak of Parnassus, beside Michelangelo and Rembrandt and their fellow geniuses.” Any controversy will certainly befit a lodestar of 20th-century art who believed that “you weren’t doing much of anything as an artist if you weren’t questioning the most fundamental tenets of what art is and what artists can do.”
A fascinating, major work that will spark endless debates.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-229839-3
Page Count: 976
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A dazzling visual homage to a music icon gone too soon.
A Los Angeles–based photographer pays tribute to a legendary musician with anecdotes and previously unseen images collected from their 25-year collaboration.
St. Nicholas (co-author: Whitney: Tribute to an Icon, 2012, etc.) first met Prince in 1991 at a prearranged photo shoot. “The dance between photographer and subject carried us away into hours of inspired photographs…and the beginning of a friendship that would last a lifetime.” In this book, the author fondly remembers their many professional encounters in the 25 years that followed. Many would be portrait sessions but done on impulse, like those in a burned-out Los Angeles building in 1994 and on the Charles Bridge in Prague in 2007. Both times, the author and Prince came together through serendipity to create playfully expressive images that came to represent the singer’s “unorthodox ability to truly live life in the moment.” Other encounters took place while Prince was performing at Paisley Park, his Minneapolis studio, or at venues in LA, New York, Tokyo, and London. One in particular came about after the 1991 release of Prince’s Diamonds and Pearls album and led to the start of St. Nicholas’ career as a video director. Prince, who nurtured young artists throughout his career, pushed the author to “trust my instincts…expand myself creatively.” What is most striking about even the most intimate of these photographs—even those shot with Mayte Garcia, the fan-turned–backup dancer who became Prince’s wife in 1996—is the brilliantly theatrical quality of the images. As the author observes, the singer was never not the self-conscious artist: “Prince was Prince 24/7.” Nostalgic and reverential, this book—the second St. Nicholas produced with/for Prince—is a celebration of friendship and artistry. Prince fans are sure to appreciate the book, and those interested in art photography will also find the collection highly appealing.
A dazzling visual homage to a music icon gone too soon.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-293923-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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