Who Shot Rock & Roll - by Gail Buckland (Hardcover)

Number of Pages: 319
Genre: Photography
Sub-Genre: Photoessays & Documentaries
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Age Range: Adult
Author: Gail Buckland
Language: English

About the Book

More than 200 spectacular photographs catch and define the energy, intoxication, rebellion, and magic of rock and roll. This work explores the photographs and the photographers who captured rock's message of freedom and personal reinvention.

Book Synopsis

More than two hundred spectacular photographs, sensual, luminous, frenzied, true, from 1955 to the present, that catch and define the energy, intoxication, rebellion, and magic of rock and roll; the first book to explore the photographs and the photographers who captured rock's message of freedom and personal reinvention--and to examine the effect of their pictures on the musicians, the fans, and the culture itself.

The only music photographers whose names are well known are those who themselves have become celebrities. But many of the images that have shaped our consciousness and desire were made by photographers whose names are unfamiliar. Here are Elvis in 1956--not yet mythic but beautiful, tender, vulnerable, sexy, photographed by Alfred Wertheimer . . . Bob Dylan and his girlfriend on a snowy Greenwich Village street, by Don Hunstein . . . John Lennon in a sleeveless New York City T-shirt, by Bob Gruen . . . Jimi Hendrix, by Gered Mankowitz, a photograph that became a poster and was hung on the walls of millions of bedrooms and college dorms . . .

For the first time, the work of these talented men and women is brought into the pantheon; we see the musicians they photographed and how the images gave rock and roll its visual identity.

To bring together these images, Gail Buckland, acclaimed photographic editor, curator, and scholar, looked through the archives of one hundred photographers, selecting pictures not on the basis of the usual suspects, but on the power of the images themselves, often picking an image a photographer didn't even remember he or she had taken.

Buckland writes about the photographers, their influences, their relationships with their subjects, how they took the images, how they saw what they saw and captured what they captured: the spirit and essence of rock.

A revelation of an art form whose iconic images changed the world as we knew it.

Review Quotes

"I love this book, and not merely for the uniformly excellent and often unexpected photographs Ms. Buckland has chosen to illustrate this love letter to rock's finest photographers (and performers). I love it, too, for Ms. Buckland's witty, moving and sometimes acerbic prose. . . Whatever Gail Buckland writes, I want to read."

--Dwight Garner, The New York Times. Selected as one of the best gift books of the year

"Visually hypnotic...The care with which Buckland selects representative photographers and their most significant images is matched by her interpretive prowess."

--Publishers' Weekly

"A very appealing collection of photography. . . impressive."

--Booklist

About the Author

Gail Buckland has written and collaborated on eleven books of photographic history, including Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography, The Magic Image (with Cecil Beaton), and The American Century (by Harold Evans). She is former curator of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, professor of the history of photography at the Cooper Union, and guest curator at many American museums. She lives in Warwick, New York, and New York City.