Juxtapoz Magazine – Studio to Stage: Music Photography from the Fifties to the Present

A new exhibition at Pace Gallery meditates on the evolution of music images, discovering exchanges across various genres, eras, and geographic destinations as element of an homage to the past century of songs and the graphic-makers that documented it. The presentation options images by Richard Avedon, Janette Beckman, Adam Cohen, Jem Cohen, Kevin Cummins, Rahim Fortune, Robert Frank, Hiro, Paul Graham, Peter Hujar, Ari Marcopoulos, Itzel Alejandra Martinez, Gordon Parks, Irving Penn, Rankin, Ming Smith, and Nick Waplington. The exhibition is curated by Mark Beasley, curatorial director of Pace Reside.

Presented chronologically on the gallery’s to start with flooring, the images in Studio to Stage, which have hardly ever been exhibited with each other, depict iconic musicians of the earlier 70 years—including Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, John Cage, The Rolling Stones, The Smiths, Spice Women, Beastie Boys, and more—and replicate the “radical continuum,” as termed by author Simon Reynolds, of new music. The images on perspective seize not only what it signifies to be a performer, but what it indicates to be a member of an viewers.

Spanning early jazz, New York hip hop, British punk, European techno, and other musical actions, Studio to Stage examines the ways that photographers have assisted cultivate mythologies close to performers and their respective scenes. The famous venues and audiences of the depicted concert events, festivals and other performances are also essential in the stories informed in the photos on watch. Between the highlights in the exhibition are Smith’s pictures of jazz musicians, Marcopoulos’s images of the Beastie Boys and Iggy Pop, and Graham’s photos of Berlin golf equipment and raves. Studio to Stage presents the history of new music as a boundless and continual coalescing of assorted appears and geographies. Amid today’s political and social polarization, the exhibition highlights music’s likely for cultivating connections and enactments of appreciation.