Picturing superstardom at Bluesfest 2013
The photographs of Gatineau’s John Rowlands are the backbone of exhibition,
John Rowlands has been close to many of the biggest names in rock and roll, and he has the photographs to prove it. The stories behind the photos are sure to be what people want to hear when the Gatineau-based photographer takes the stage for a Q&A at RBC Royal Bank Bluesfest on Saturday, July 13.
One image that people are sure to ask about — though it’s not included in an exhibition of photos and posters now up at Bluesfest — is Rowlands’ “archer” image of David Bowie, shot at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto in 1976. Bowie stands in profile and pulls the string of an imaginary bow. The photo has been written up around the world this summer, as a signature image of a popular Bowie exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, England.
“We’d meet every morning for breakfast and he’d go through the contact sheets,” Rowlands recalls of Bowie. “The second day with breakfast, he was flipping through 25 contact sheets and after 12 he hadn’t made a mark, so I was thinking I should slink out under the door. So he continued through the 25 and handed them back to me and said, ‘John, I like the way you see.’”
Bowie chose six photographs to be sent to RCA, the record label for which Rowlands, then a young freelancer, was working.
The image remains a huge hit all these years later. Three hundred copies, produced by the V&A and signed by Bowie, are selling at ever-increasing prices. The smallest size, 16 by 20 inches, started out at £700 each, Rowlands says, and are now selling for “just under £3,000” — about $4,600.
That photo is exclusive to the V& A during that exhibition, though Rowlands will be signing posters of the shot after his Q&A on Saturday.
Even without Bowie, Rowlands’ work is the backbone of the exhibition of photographs and posters on display in the lobby of the Canadian War Museum during Bluesfest.
Highlights include a shot of a very young Mick Jagger leaning toward Rowlands’ lens at the Gardens in 1966.
“Mick knew me by face at that point,” Rowlands says.
“I was a 19-year-old kid, he wasn’t that much older. We actually met here in Ottawa the year before.”
They’d met at a Rolling Stones’ show at the Auditorium on Metcalfe Street in Ottawa in 1965. Rowlands was shooting from the front of the crowd when “a fracas broke out between the Squirrels and the Yohawks,” two Ottawa street gangs, so he ended up shooting on stage.
Another highlight is his shot of Linda Ronstadt — “she’s a cutie,” he says — at Varsity Stadium in Toronto in 1973. Ronstadt, all big eyes and hair and wearing a pair of Daisy Duke cutoffs, holds the mic stand and looks contemplative. (Incidentally, her band then included future Eagles Don Henley and Glenn Frey.)
The Bluesfest exhibition also includes work by Vancouver’s Bob Masse, who for almost 50 years has made rock and roll posters for everybody from the Grateful Dead and the Doors to Ottawa’s own Alanis Morissette. Masse helped to establish the genre of psychedelic art and posters that became such a part of rock and roll. Masse will also be at Bluesfest for a public Q&A, at 6 p.m. on Sunday, July 14, in the Barney Danson Theatre.
There’s another photographer with work in the exhibition whose presence there may surprise some viewers. Sandy Sharkey is best known as the former cohost of BOB-FM’s morning radio show. Since Sharkey and the station parted ways a few months ago, she’s been focusing on photography, a longtime passion. Sharkey is among the best of the local photographers who routinely shoot Bluesfest (and any other festival she attends with her husband, the musician Rob Bennett). The best of her lot in the exhibition is a shot of Dave Navarro, of Jane’s Addiction. Navarro, shirtless and covered in tattoos and muscles, stands with his guitar in hand and looks every part the wild rock and roller. “I’ve always maintained,” Sharkey says, “that the best way to see a band is outside, hot summer night, cold beer in hand, maybe a breeze from a nearby river, and that is what Bluesfest is all about.”
She’s formed her own photography company, Cabin Road Art (at sandysharkey.com). She’s also shooting a lot of nature, including a recent trip to California to photograph wild horses. In her debut appearance at the Glebe’s Art in the Park last month, she sold 23 framed pieces.
The exhibition, which also includes photographs by Peter Waiser, continues until the end of Bluesfest on July 14.