Juxtapoz Magazine – Studio to Stage: Music Photography from the Fifties to the Present

A new exhibition at Tempo Gallery meditates on the evolution of music images, checking out exchanges across distinct genres, eras, and geographic areas as component of an homage to the very last century of music and the image-makers that documented it. The presentation options pictures by Richard Avedon, Janette Beckman, Adam Cohen, Jem Cohen, Kevin Cummins, Rahim Fortune, Robert Frank, Hiro, Paul Graham, Peter Hujar, Ari Marcopoulos, Itzel Alejandra Martinez, Gordon Parks, Irving Penn, Rankin, Ming Smith, and Nick Waplington. The exhibition is curated by Mark Beasley, curatorial director of Tempo Dwell.

Introduced chronologically on the gallery’s initial floor, the photos in Studio to Stage, which have almost never been exhibited together, depict legendary musicians of the previous 70 years—including Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, John Cage, The Rolling Stones, The Smiths, Spice Girls, Beastie Boys, and more—and replicate the “radical continuum,” as termed by writer Simon Reynolds, of songs. The photos on watch capture not only what it suggests to be a performer, but what it suggests to be a member of an viewers.

Spanning early jazz, New York hip hop, British punk, European techno, and other musical actions, Studio to Stage examines the strategies that photographers have served cultivate mythologies all-around performers and their respective scenes. The famous venues and audiences of the depicted concert events, festivals and other performances are also vital in the stories told in the photos on see. Amongst the highlights in the exhibition are Smith’s pictures of jazz musicians, Marcopoulos’s images of the Beastie Boys and Iggy Pop, and Graham’s photographs of Berlin clubs and raves. Studio to Phase provides the historical past of new music as a boundless and continuous coalescing of assorted sounds and geographies. Amid today’s political and social polarization, the exhibition highlights music’s opportunity for cultivating connections and enactments of appreciation.