Photo: courtesy of Fiona Adams/NPG
A group photograph of 10 of the year’s best-selling female performers, taken by the fashion photographer John French, will be one of 150 pictures from the 60s to be exhibited for the first time in the National Portrait Gallery’s big autumn show.
Organisers promised rare or unseen glimpses of bands from the Beatles to the Kinks and singers from Cliff Richard to Billy Fury.
Cultural shifts
“This exhibition’s central message is about how music changed the world,” said the gallery’s director, Sandy Nairne. “The cultural shifts from the late 50s to the end of the 60s see fantastically important shifts in our society and in politics and at the centre of that were images and ideas through music that changed expectations, opportunities and possibilities.”
The exhibition’s curator, Terence Pepper, has clearly enjoyed the months of sifting through thousands of negatives, magazines and archives to create the show Beatles to Bowie: the 60s Exposed.
Memorable images
Pepper said he hoped the show would raise the profile of the 60s photographers, not least that of Fiona Adams, who was the previously uncredited creator of one of the decade’s most memorable images – the Beatles leaping in to the air, which went on the front of the Twist and Shout EP.
“It is one of the defining images of 20th-century culture yet it is only in the past two or three years that we’ve known who took the photograph,” said Pepper.
The show will run from October to January and will have in total 150 photographs and 150 items of ephemera, including pop magazines such as Fabulous and Rave.
From The Guardian
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Looks like a great exhibition. Shame we’ve got to wait until October to see it. Thanks for the heads-up!