Stepping out of Paul’s shadow

There’s no doubt that Linda McCartney’s talent as a photographer was eclipsed by the monumental fame and ubiquity of her husband, Paul, and the Beatles. But Linda Eastman (1941-98) had an established career before she met and married Paul McCartney. In 1967 she was US Female Photographer of the Year and worked as resident photographer at Fillmore East, Bill Graham’s rock venue in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Her portrait of Eric Clapton in 1968 was the first by a woman photographer to grace the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.

While her portraits of rock musicians (Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger to name a few) are interesting enough, they are on the whole neither particularly revelatory nor intimate. But they do sometimes present the novel or original, and there are unguarded moments (in particular her portrait of Jagger, taken on the Hudson River, in 1966).

McCartney was bonded to her camera, in the best sense of the term, and took as inspiration photographers such as Walker Evans and Diane Arbus. She had done some initial training, in Arizona, under Hazel Archer who had been a student of Josef Albers at Black Mountain College. Such an education, however brief, allowed her to become acquainted with the work of Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange among others.

McCartney had a keen eye for the quirky, the intimate and, perhaps most of all, the familial. She also had a keen compositional sense, underpinned by an informal, intuitive response to her subject matter, and she regarded her lack of formal training as a creative asset.

The McCartneys famously kept a retreat near Campbelltown on the Kintyre peninsula and it was here during, and in the aftermath of, the Beatles’ break-up in 1970 that some of her best work was done. There are some great, fun family shots, revealing the “ordinary” side of life. A series of black and white contact sheets gives an insight into her working process: in one, there are separate shots of a standing stone, a hill horizon and a horse. Eventually all of these elements align to give what comes close to a perfect composition, with surreal elements.

This important, touring show goes a long way to re-establishing McCartney’s reputation as a photographer with a real and unique talent whose archive is surely an important artistic and social document.

Until January 12, 2020