From Her to Eternity: The Women Who Photograph Music

Between the stage and the audience in the front row of the concerts there is a space where the photographers gather to take the images that will illustrate the chronicles, a hole known as the pit from which the artists are shot during a few songs on the hunt. of the snapshot that reflects the moment. Elbows, flashes and telephoto lenses in a physical place traditionally dominated by men in which the female presence has experienced a gradual crescendo that is reflected in the exhibition From her to eternity: the women who photograph music. Located on a massive mural in the Wabash area of ​​downtown Chicago, the show features 46 large images taken over the years by women photographers whose role has sometimes been unfairly undervalued.

Bjork, by Kate Garner

Kate Garner

The sample covers half a century of music, from the legendary Aretha Franklin to the Pussy Riot passing through Ringo Starr, the Ramones, Amy Winehouse, Lana del Rey or Nick Cave, images taken both live and in a studio that testify to the long-lasting presence female behind the camera that the exhibition, curated by Julie Pannebianco and Courtney Love, wants to value by putting names and surnames.

“We want to highlight the invisible role of women behind the camera in the music industry,” explains Ruth Baza from Madrid, a member of the Archive of Contemporary Music (ARC), the entity behind the show. A photographer as well as a journalist and writer, Baza remembers that her first camera was a Kodak Instamatic with which she took images of the actors who appeared on television. It was at the age of 17 that she began to take photographs professionally as a complement to her articles, beginning a career that has led her to participate in the exhibition with a photograph of the British Blur taken in the 90s during a party held at a dog track. London, on the occasion of the publication of the album Park Life.

Blur in 1993, by Ruth Baza

Ruth Asks

In her long career, Baza has felt the unequal treatment of her male partners who saw her as “a little damsel” on stage, where she was often the only woman. “A person like me, tall but very skinny, was suddenly surrounded by giants who push and overwhelm you and don’t let you see anything.” This inequality was transferred to public recognition, where she “has always given precedence to the role of men over that of women, she has valued herself more”, which has not prevented the appearance of great photographers represented in the sample. Among them, Baza highlights two names present in the exhibition such as Linda McCartney, “also enormous as a woman, as a photographer and as a philanthropist, as an activist”, and Laura Levine “with a great role in the entire world of music with her documentation of all the punk scene in the 70s and 80s in New York”. To these two names she adds that of Jill Furmanovsky, who throughout her career has portrayed Pink Floyd, Oasis, the Stones and Amy Winehouse. “The quality, the quantity, the legacy and the contribution of women in this field is brutal, it is impressive,” remarks Baza, highlighting at the same time the documentary work that the ARC carries out in parallel to the exhibition to keep alive the memory of female photography.

“Courtney Love and Julie Pannebianco are the women who instituted this board within the archive in which we are women from different fields of the arts and communication in the world of music,” explains the Madrid-born photographer, noting that the role of the widow of Kurt Cobain in the exhibition has been very active. “Julie has been working intensively for a year and a half with all the photographers, but always under Courtney’s supervision, despite being a rock star she is a girl who likes to supervise things, she is not on Olympus.”

Weyes Blood, por Neelam Khan

Neelam Khan

When Ruth Baza retired from the world of photography in the early 2000s, Neelam Khan had barely picked up a camera. At the age of 27 and a career that she began in London working for the music magazine NME, this Barcelonan living in Berlin was taken by surprise by her presence at the exhibition, where she participates with an image of the American Weyes Blood. Although he has been dedicating himself to photography for years, it was not until after the pandemic that he did it 100% professionally, “I started working more with Amaia, and that opened more doors for me. Now, touring with Weyes Blood, I feel like it’s the first tour I’ve done very seriously”, he explains, although it’s not the first time he’s toured with other artists. From her personal experience, Khan sees a more positive outlook for women in the world of music photography, “there are so many female photographers today,” she says, to remind herself that when she’s in concert “the vast majority of the time it’s always quite mix or even more women.” This reality leads her to think that “we have taken over that space, we have appropriated it, things have balanced a bit” although she does not forget how in the beginning she came across veteran photographers “looking over her shoulder” at me, without specifying if it was because of her status as a woman, as a rookie or as a new competition.

The greater female presence does not, however, fix the other major problem of female photography, which is its lack of visibility, another of the objectives of the exhibition that Khan highlights, noting that “I didn’t even know the vast majority of female photographers. who participate in this exhibition, and that I am one of them, is crazy”. A necessary didactic function, which has led the organizers to contact other cities to move the sample to other parts of the planet once the sample ends in Chicago, next September.

The Ramones, by Roberta Bayley

Roberta Bayley

Courtney Love, by Katarina Benzova

Katarina Benzova

Lana del Rey by Ellen von Unwerth

Ellen von Unwerth

Aretha Franklin por Linda McCartney

Linda McCartney
2023-08-06 04:03:13
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