Not Fade Away:
The Rock & Roll Photography of Jim Marshall
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Bulfinch Press/ Little, Brown, 130 pages, $50
At the end of the preface to his superb new book, “Not Fade Away,” bad-boy roughneck photographer Jim Marshall paraphrases Louis Armstrong: “There are two kinds of music: good and bad. That applies to photography, too.”
Marshall may have taken his share of bad photographs, but few other rock photographers have taken more great photographs. His book contains more than 125 photos and portraits of stars in rock, jazz and the blues.
Marshall’s technique was plain but hardly simple: He immersed himself in the environment, getting his subjects to trust him and confide in him–to relax and reveal themselves.
“When you see my pictures, it’s about the person in the photograph, not me–not the guy behind the lens,” Marshall wrote. What he was getting at was photographers whose portraits document their own techniques and aesthetics more than the personalities of their subjects.
Compare that with Marshall’s photograph of Little Richard, looking both sullen and pretty backstage in San Francisco (1971); of Janis Joplin pretending to strangle her friend (and alleged rival) Grace Slick (1967); of Duane Allman noodling on his guitar in a hotel bathroom (1969); of Bob Dylan, Robbie Robertson, Allen Ginsberg and others hanging out in a San Francisco alley (1965); or his now iconic photograph of Johnny Cash at San Quentin prison, waving his middle finger like a samurai sword (1970).
“A lot of the kinds of photographs I took in the past I can’t get anymore,” Marshall writes. “No one can because the bands are not granting that kind of access, and if there’s not as much access, there are not as many revealing portraits.”
Perhaps, as Marshall admits, some of his peers have brought the situation upon themselves. On the other hand, the stars seem to demand much more control of their images these days, restricting access to the sorts of moments and places Marshall was able to photograph.
Marshall was, from the mid-1960s through the early ’70s, a vagabond with a camera, an artist who kept his presence and his techniques secondary to the events and the people around him. “My style,” he wrote, “is that I don’t have a style.”
What he had, though, was a knack for capturing intimate moments, a sixth sense for the black-and-white truth–an aesthetic that the rock industry (performers and their managers) is slowly extinguishing. That’s what makes Marshall’s book so vital and its title so ironic.