United Kingdom • 1938-2019

Rock Legends 

 

This is a fantasy London. The one we wish we’d known, the bubbling, heightened, delirious world of the early 1960s. Born in 1938, Terry O’Neill experienced it like none other. The boy who dreamed of being a drummer in a jazz club planned to become an air steward so that he could travel to the United States and study the greats of African-American music. As fate would have it, he met the art of photography along the way. At the time, rock‘n’roll was sweeping the world, - including Europe - by storm. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were eager to break with how bands usually came across and performed. They wanted 
something more natural, more relaxed, more abrasive, and less conventional. And Terry O’Neill was the man for the job, becoming one of the key witnesses to a musical and societal revolution in the process.

His style was direct and spontaneous. He was unafraid to ask his models to pose in unexpected places, or to capture more relaxed moments. Today, that’s perfectly routine. But at the time, it was groundbreaking. The world’s media, from Vogue to Paris Match, snapped up his work. Some of his photos even went so far as to shape the identity artists carved into the collective imagination for posterity. Think a glam David Bowie, the electrifying energy of Elton John or a pouting Mick Jagger – all legends who have ultimately gone down in history. At a time when photography was (already) the best way to create a mythos, it transformed these musicians into icons. O’Neill’s images are on permanent display in many museums and you can’t help but feel a twinge of nostalgia when contemplating his shots. 

You wonder whether there will ever be another era of such creative freedom and cultural revolution again, which spawned so many giants. If so, we can only hope that a photographer of Terry O’Neill's calibre is there to immortalise it.

 

LABYRINTHE VÉGÉTAL