Post by the juf on Apr 24th, 2008 at 3:54am
ETHAN RUSSELL - LET IT BLEED:
THE ROLLING STONES 1969 U.S. TOUR
Photo exhibition and book presentation
Produced and curated in association with Raj Prem Fine Art Photography and Rhino Entertainment.
Acclaimed photographer Ethan Russell has chosen V!P’s International Art Galleries in Rotterdam for the European presentation of his much anticipated new show and book LET IT BLEED: THE ROLLING STONES 1969 U.S. TOUR.
The show, which contains over 100 stunning images from the official photographer of the tour, begins on April 27 and will run through June 1, 2008.
A special opening reception will take place on April 26 with the legendary photographer in attendance.
In 1969, a disparate group of sixteen travelers gathered in a Los Angeles hilltop home. Five of them were the Rolling Stones. In the waning days of the sixties, they crisscrossed America, a band on tour and the intimate cadre that supported them, to arrive among a chaotic crowd of 400.000 at Altamont Speedway. One photographer captured the images of the exciting moments, the quiet moments, and the tragic moments that marked this journey. A story you think you know is finally told in intimate first-hand narrative and exquisite rare photography. Ethan Russell brings to life this extraordinary story through new interviews and unpublished vintage photographs in LET IT BLEED: THE ROLLING STONES 1969 U.S. TOUR, a remarkable 420-page collectors-edition book published by Rhino.
Beginning with some of the last photos taken of Brian Jones before his death, and continuing to a stage-eye view of Altamont, Russell captures the monumental spectacle, and the intimate personal moments of the Rolling Stones on the road in this special transitional time.
Before Altamont, stages were four feet high and bands flew on commercial airlines. The small crew of workers and aides that accompanied the Stones was like a family. Afterward, armed bodyguards, charter flights, celebrity hangers-on and massive barriers between audience and artist became the way of the bombastic seventies.
The book and the exhibition chronicle the changing of a band, a music-industry paradigm, a country, an era, and the lives of sixteen people who witnessed it all. In its exploration of the tour, transpiring in the short window between the optimism of Woodstock and the tragic violence at Altamont, the book becomes a de facto reflection of a generation.
To compliment the breathtaking photography, Ethan Russell interviewed the small group of people, from divergent backgrounds, who all found themselves together on that incredible trip. "There were only 16 of us," Russell writes, "including the five Rolling Stones, and our average age was 26. We were from Sweden, London's East End, Boston, the Okefenokee Swamp, East L.A., San Francisco, Miami. We were English, American, Scots, Swedish, and middle-class, privileged, poor, black, idealistic, and criminal."
"You could easily imagine that lives as disparate as ours, as geographically separate, would never cross. What could bring us together?," writes Russell in the Preface to LET IT BLEED. Radio - and the rock and roll music it played - is the answer. "Suddenly Bill Wyman, Stanley Booth, Mick Jagger and I were having the same experience, listening to Chuck Berry."
In 1968 Ethan Russell was a young American with a Nikon camera living in London and hoping to become a writer. His hobby was photography. A few years later he was one of the foremost rock photographers in the world. From his early, almost accidental, photo sessions with John Lennon and Mick Jagger he went on to photograph the legendary Rolling Stones' "Rock n Roll Circus," the single time that John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards played in the first "supergroup." He documented the Beatles "Let It Be" from start to finish. He leapfrogged America with the Stones in the tour of 1969 and again on the celebrity studded 1972 tour. He is the only photographer to create covers for the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who. For fifteen years, Russell photographed real moments with extraordinary people in a way that pulled timeless portraits from the flow of events. Ethan Russell continues to write and photograph. He lives with his family in Marin, California.
Gallery address:
Westelijk Handelsterrein,
Van Vollenhovenstraat 15, 3016 BE Rotterdam
+31 102251120
[email protected]
Gallery hours:
from Tuesday through Sunday, 12:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.
