The Brooklyn Museum's "Who Shot Rock & Roll"

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From its very start, rock ’n’ roll was never just about the music. The hair, the clothes, the drugs, the sex: the accoutrements of the rock ’n’ roll revolution worked in concert, and, especially during its formative years, the delivery mechanism for all these elements was photography. From the thrust of Elvis Presley’s hips on the cover of his first album, shot by William "Red" Robertson, to Bob Gruen’s portrait of John Lennon, arms crossed, outfitted in a sleeveless New York City T-shirt, the history of rock music’s evolution is contained as much in still images as it is in audio files. And yet, the artistic value of these images themselves — especially those that were used as commercial devices, on posters or album covers — has been discounted largely in favor of an appreciation of the subjects they captured. Until now.

On October 30, the Brooklyn Museum opens "Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present," an exhibition of some 175 works from 105 photographers who chronicled the rock ’n’ roll revolution. The first major museum exhibition to explore the images of rock ’n’ roll through a critical curatorial lens, rather than through, more simply, the eye of a pop culture beholder, the show includes works by photographers traditionally celebrated for their artistic achievements, like Diane Arbus and Andreas Gursky. And it also incorporates prints by photographers whose work, though commercially successful, has not necessarily been welcomed into art photography by conventional industry standard-bearers.

Don Hunstein’s photograph of Bob Dylan and girlfriend Suze Rotolo, which graced the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, may have been a cultural touchstone, but it was recognized for capturing the quiet moment of an icon, not for photographic excellence. And the images chronicling the 1970s punk scene at CBGB shot by the photographer known simply as Godlis were celebrated for opening a window on the lives of these rock icons, but not for their artistic achievement. The Brooklyn Museum’s show makes the case that these images deserve recognition for their artistic superiority and that it is time to include them in the broader scope of the history of photography.

"We’ve always acknowledged that rock ’n’ roll was one of the greatest revolutions," says photography historian and "Who Shot Rock & Roll" curator Gail Buckland. "And it was photographs that really shaped the consciousness and desire of rock music audiences. Many of those images on album covers or posters were done by people whose names we don’t know, but they’ve had unbelievable impact on our lives."

While Buckland, the former Olympus Visiting Professor of the History of Photography at the Cooper Union, may be well equipped to curate a show on photography, she is not, by her own admission, particularly knowledgeable about rock. But she credits her lack of intimacy with the music scene with allowing her to disassociate the iconography of rock from the pictures that served as vehicles for its dispersal. "I’m no expert on rock ’n’ roll, so the criteria for this show was excellence in photography," Buckland says. "I hope people come away with this wonderful experience of brilliant photography whose subject happens to be some of the most exciting people who walked the planet." She adds, "Most people who look at these photographs are interested in who’s in the pictures. So it has taken someone as ignorant as I to do this."

While many rock clubs and music-photography galleries have hosted shows of rock photography, it is this show’s placement in the Brooklyn Museum, with its attendant curatorial and design departments and inherent acceptance of this kind of photography as legitimate art, that lends credence to "Who Shot Rock." "The way photography has been presented in museums or in places like the Rock and Roll [Hall of Fame] is that the photographs are seen within the context of lots of ephemera," says Matthew Yokobosky, the Brooklyn Museum’s chief designer and designer of the "Who Shot Rock" show. "It’s a very specific type of presentation. We’re showing this as fine art photography. It’s about the photographs, not about the musicians per se."