Time capsule
As a retrospective of the late Linda McCartney’s photographs opens at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale in Victoria, Hannah-Rose Yee celebrates her most iconic images.
As a retrospective of the late Linda McCartney’s photographs opens in Victoria, we celebrate her most iconic images.
Linda McCartney was not supposed to be on that boat. And yet that’s where she was, one day in 1966, the only photographer on a yacht full of journalists jostling for time with Mick Jagger and Brian Jones. The Rolling Stones were in New York at the dawn of their rockstar journey and Linda – then Linda Eastman, a receptionist at Town & Country magazine who hailed from a suburb in Westchester County, New York – had never professionally taken a photograph before.
But taking photographs is what she desperately wanted to do after first discovering a camera and film while studying at the University of Arizona. So much so that when Linda opened the mail one morning at Town & Country and saw the invitation onto the Rolling Stones’ yacht, she dropped it into her handbag, called in sick to work, and turned up on the jetty. That was how she ended up, all “swagger and calmness”, her daughter Mary McCartney once described her, capturing two budding legends in a moment of total and uncharacteristic ease. This image of Jagger and Jones in repose would be part of Linda’s first published photoshoot. “They are still some of the best pictures she ever took,” Mary has reflected.
You can see this picture, along with more than 200 others, in an all-encompassing retrospective of Linda’s work on display later this month at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, Australia’s leading photography festival. Curated by the family – husband Paul, daughters Mary, a fellow photographer, and fashion designer Stella – and drawing from her 200,000-strong archive, the selection includes a number of rare photographs from a family trip to Melbourne, late in Linda’s life and before her death from breast cancer at the age of 56 in 1998. The exhibition is a celebration of Linda’s phenomenal breadth of work, recognised today for its naturalism and for the casual, joyous energy that leaks out of every image like a lens flare. Her portraits of everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Kate Moss are effortless, but it’s her family photographs – of husband Paul and children Heather, Mary, Stella and James – that shimmer with love and life. Baby Mary zipped into her father’s coat, a young James leaping from a Range Rover as Stella plays in the grass while Paul, wrapped in a trench, poses atop a wooden fence; these are unforgettable images of an extraordinary – yet still ordinary – family. A perfect moment, frozen in time.
Linda was the first female photographer to shoot a cover of Rolling Stone – she photographed Eric Clapton in 1968 – and had already established herself as an artist before she married Paul in 1969. In recent years, the McCartney family has worked hard to preserve her legacy through retrospectives such as this one. “I always used to joke that I ruined Linda’s career,” Paul once reflected. “She became known as ‘Paul’s wife’, instead of the focus being on her photography. But as time went on, people started to realise that she was the real thing.”
Linda McCartney runs from August 28 to October 24 at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale. For tickets, go to ballaratfoto.org.