The Photography of Jim Marshall
Jim Marshall | July 23 – September 16, 2015
About the Artist
Jim Marshall was born in 1936 and grew up in the Fillmore district of San Francisco. As a kid he fell in love with music, and by the time he was a teenager he was a permanent fixture in the North Beach coffeehouses. There a decade later, he began to photograph resident artists in natural light and mid-gesture.
Marshall’s response, both emotional and photographic, was strongest to the jazz and folk musicians. Not surprisingly, the first money he earned from his photography came from the sale of a musician’s portrait; Riverside bought a picture of Bev Kelly for twenty-five dollars and used it on the back of an album cover.
Since then, Marshall has photographed the world’s pre-eminent jazz, country, folk, blues and rock musicians, always with the greatest respect and affection. During the most extraordinary times yet for popular music, Jim Marshall seemed to be everywhere that mattered; an informal portrait of John Coltrane, a boyish Bob Dylan kicking a tire down a New York street, Hendrix immolating his Strat at Monterey Pop, The Who greeting the sunrise at Woodstock, Johnny Cash flipping a big F-you at the warden of San Quentin, The Allman Brothers Live at the Fillmore East, and Miles Davis at the First Isle of Wight Festival.
Jim lived the life alongside his subjects and never betrayed their trust; he was granted second-to-none access. Marshall was the only photographer allowed backstage to what proved to be The Beatles’ final concert at Candlestick Park. Jim’s photos from the Monterey Pop Festival became as woven into the lore of the ‘60s as the breakout performances of Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Otis Redding. Jim also captured moments of unguarded intimacy, such as Janis Joplin lounging backstage with a bottle of Southern Comfort and Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix strolling the Monterey fairgrounds. Marshall documented Johnny Cash during his ground breaking concerts for prison reform, at Folsom and San Quentin Prisons.
With over 500 album covers of the great musicians, and, thousands of photos of GRAMMY Award winners of the 20th century to his credit Jim Marshall has been a dominant force in bringing popular music to the masses. For every year of the GRAMMY Awards, from Count Basie and Winton Marsalis, Willie Nelson and Shelby Lynne, BB King and Lenny Kravitz, Frank Sinatra and John Mayer, Sheryl Crow and Miriam Makeba, Eric Clapton and Ben Harper, there has always been a GRAMMY Award Winner who was photographed by Jim Marshall.
In 2014 Jim Marshall became the first and only photographer to be honored by the Grammys with a Trustees Award for his lifework.
The evidence is the explanation: a body of work in which each picture describes the musician’s character rather than Marshall’ ego. Jim said it simply, “It’s never just been a job it’s been my LIFE.”
The Photography of Jim Marshall
San Francisco photographer, Jim Marshall (1936-2010) was the pre-eminent music photographer and journalist of the 20th century.
Born in 1936, Marshall grew up in the Fillmore District of San Francisco. At an early age, he fell in love with music and cameras and began photographing with a box camera. He was a fixture in San Francisco’s North Beach coffeehouses and soon was photographing resident musicians throughout the city with a Leica rangefinder. Jim’s big break came after a chance run in with John Coltrane and afterwards went on to shoot jazz greats such as Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, among others. After spending two years in New York to become established, he returned to San Francisco for good and began shooting for Rolling Stone and Time Magazine.
One of his favorite and most famous subjects, Miles Davis, was also among his most difficult. Marshall had petitioned to photograph the unwilling Davis on several occasions and was rejected each time. Marshall finally won Davis’ respect and friendship after presenting him with a photograph he had taken of Davis’ idol, John Coltrane. The rapport he developed with Miles Davis was repeated with many of the musicians that he photographed over the years. Through the lens of his Leica cameras he was able to capture moments that were unforced with little direction from his subjects, developing for himself a solid reputation and becoming the first choice among some of the greatest musicians of all time.
Jim, who passed away in 2010, dedicated his life to his craft and has been credited with over 500 album covers. He has been published countless times and has many book titles credited to his name, the latest being: The Haight: Love Rock and Revolution, published last year through his estate owned and operated by longtime assistant and friend, Amelia Davis.
“Jim always attributed his ability to capture the authentic, vulnerable and often insane moments of the musicians he photographed to the unencumbered access he had with them,” says Davis. “He was able to spend time with them on planes, backstage and anywhere else he could manage without time limitations and legions of other people telling him what, where and how many minutes to shoot. That and the pureness that came from the lenses of his beloved Leica cameras.”
It was this access that gave Marshall the rare distinction of having a portrait of at least one Grammy award winning artist for each of the 55 years since the Grammy’s began and in 2014 he was posthumously awarded the Trustees Award from The Recording Academy – a Special Merit Award Grammy that honors contributions to music in areas other than performance.
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