Sight and sound

Portland exhibit takes visitors backstage with the Beatles, Stones, and more

January 31, 2009|Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

PORTLAND, Maine - We listen to music with our ears, but we experience it with our eyes, too. That's especially true of rock 'n' roll. At it's best no less than at its worst, rock is a form of play-acting: adolescents pretending to be adults, adults pretending to be adolescents, Chrissie Hynde being a Pretender. It's air guitar with real guitars. Like any actor, a rocker needs costume, props, and pose. Elvis wouldn't be Elvis without his sneer. Dylan wouldn't be Dylan if he looked like a movie star. Bono needs those godawful glasses for true Bono-ness to obtain.

"Backstage Pass: Rock & Roll Photography," which runs at the Portland Museum of Art through March 22, bears abundant witness to how important visuals are to the rock imagination. How abundant? It includes 268 photographs by some 50 photographers. Think of the show as a Woodstock for the eyes.

The analogy isn't just a matter of quantity. Woodstock became the most famous of rock festivals because of how difficult it could be to experience the music as well as the music itself. "Backstage Pass" is hung more for impact than close looking. Many of the photographs are poster size. This may be rock-world appropriate - the poster is almost as important a part of the music as Stratocasters and creative hair - but visually the effect is crude and overbearing.

Gallery walls have been painted a burnt-creamsicle orange and aged-avocado green. This is at first amusing. The joke falls flat with any prolonged attempt to look at the pictures, which are overwhelmed by the Populuxe colors.

Worst of all, two-thirds of the 40 pictures hang outside the exhibition galleries, in the museum's Great Hall, and they're so high up they're hard to look at. Viewed as a whole, the display makes a terrific impression. But the contents of the display are meant to be seen individually. Certainly, Nat Finkelstein's jaw-dropping 1965 photograph of Dylan and Andy Warhol flanking one of Warhol's Elvis silkscreens is. If there were such a thing as Byzantium rock, mosaics would have a place in a show like this, but there isn't and they don't.

Such complaints could be said to miss the point. Why take an Aperture approach to what's really a Rolling Stone show? A couple of major photographers show up, Lee Friedlander and W. Eugene Smith. But the way their work in no way stands out is instructive. Smith was a lion of photojournalism. Yet his one image here, of Dyl an at the piano during a mid-'60s recording session, barely registers against the many nearby portraits of the singer by such lesser photographers as Barry Feinstein and Daniel Kramer. Rock photography really would appear to be a specialized calling.