60s legends take to the walls in new exhibition

Saturday 09 March 2019

Music greats of the 1960s and beyond, including The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and Pink Floyd, are being brought together on the walls of a Jersey gallery in a rocking new exhibition.

Mike McCartney, younger brother of Sir Paul, Carinthia West and Rupert Truman are being brought together for the first time in a joint exhibition at CCA Galleries.

Much of the work, including early portraits of The Beatles by Mike McCartney, have not previously been shown publicly. Gallery director, Sasha Gibb said that the work was "inspiring, funny and completely real".

Pictured: 'Ouija Board' by Mick McCartney.

Mike McCartney is one of the most versatile artists, combining photography with performance art.  Along with Roger McGough and John Gorman, he was a member of the Scaffold which released the 1968 Christmas number one ‘Lily the Pink’.

He was a photographer throughout a musical career which ended in the 1980s and earned the nickname ‘flash Harry’ from Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein when he started to take pictures with a flash gun.

Carinthia West was a muse to rock icons, model, actress, photographer and writer. All through her career she had a camera at her side capturing intimate moments of her celebrity friends. As ‘Muse’ Magazine wrote, Carinthia was "a free spirit, blissfully unaware that she was candidly recording icons and iconic moments of the times’. Or as Ronnie Wood puts it ‘Carinthia took photos while we were getting on with life..."

At 16, she was discovered standing at a bus stop on the King’s Road by Beatles photographer Robert Whitaker who introduced her to the world of the Swinging 60s icons.

Pictured: Carinthia West kept a visual diary of the icons she came across, such as Rod Stewart.

In 1976, she was chosen by Eric Idle to act in his comedy series ‘Rutland Weekend Television’, and the cult film ‘The Rutles’. She took her Canon cameras on set, and kept a visual diary from then on, photographing those who crossed her path, including George Harrison, Helen Mirren, Carly Simon, and David Bowie, who became her friends and allowed her to photograph them behind the scenes. 

Rupert Truman began working with Storm Thorgerson, the graphic designer and video director, in the early 1980s, however his interest in photography started long before. As a teenager, he worked with his father’s Kodak rangefinder camera, and an enlarger that he had bought in Chile in the 1950s. 

Pictured: Steve Miller Band's Big Discs by Rupert Truman.

Truman worked increasingly with Storm, shooting almost all of the studio’s output from the late 80s, and after Storm’s death in 2013, Truman inherited the studio with colleagues Dan Abbott and Peter Curzon. 

Visitors can go 'Behind the Lens' until 24 April.