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Mick Jagger. The Photobook.
Sunday marks the close of “Mick Jagger. The Photobook.” at Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia. Curated by François Hébel and featuring the most iconic shots of Jagger from the gamut of the last half-century’s portraiture greats from Cecil Beaton to Anne Lebovitz and seemingly everyone in between. The exhibition takes a look at his position as the definitive and undying icon of rock stardom. And in the context of today’s musical landscape, Jagger’s seeming permanence in rock iconography is jarring. He is nothing less than a cultural monument.
Movements in culture and art no longer gel and dominate for a decade or so at a time, but ebb and flow by the season, each one borrowing gratuitously from something that came before it. For music, save today’s disastrously bad radio pop (which survives as the last bastion of old distribution models and thanks to the easy manipulation of pre-teen girls), this means no more definitive sound. No more definitive rockstar. Jagger is the last.
And as we listen to ever more sophisticated music in ever more isolated space, lost in noise-cancelling devices and privy to exponentially larger and more eclectic music libraries than were imaginable even a decade ago, one can only wonder what fragmented legacy today’s music will leave. The sound of a decade is no longer galvanised in a style, no longer called to mind by a distinctive song or particular instrument, and also no longer subject to its level of technology. But decades from now we’ll all still listen to Jagger and the Stones. Probably with our grandkids. And our parents. And probably out loud.
Catch the exhibition while it’s still open, together with a parallel show of emotional Marco Anelli works, at Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia in Piazza Tito Lucrezio Caro 1 in Milano.
