JIM MARSHALL: PROOF
by Jim Marshall
You know these images well: Janis Joplin backstage with a bottle of Southern
Comfort; the Beatles leaving their last public performance at Candlestick
Park; Johnny Cash flipping off the warden of San Quentin Prison;
Bob Dylan rolling a tire down a street in Greenwich Village. Photographer
Jim Marshall was responsible for all of the above, and plenty more
that would jog your memory. He has clicked away at musicians of all
kinds, literary figures, actors, rights leaders, and chief justices. He has an
uncanny ability to snap photos that really capture the essence of people—
being themselves. Jim Marshall: Proof is a collection of Marshall’s famous
images and the proof sheets that accompany them.
Joel Selvin, who collaborated with Marshall on this book and
Monterey Pop, explains in his introduction why Marshall was the
foremost music photojournalist of his time: “All Marshall’s best
photographs freeze a moment—a musician playing, someone
speaking, kicking a tire; an expression flickering across a face—
instants so brief Marshall must have been telepathic to capture
them. His images are silent, but they are filled with music and
song. Something visceral tugs at Marshall virtually every time he
clicks the shutter.”
But Marshall is not only revered for his work shooting memorable
photographs of the people we know, he has grabbed our
attention with stark, honest images of severe poverty in the Appalachians,
sorrow and loss during the civil rights movement, and
regular work-a-day Italian garbage collectors in San Francisco,
among others. Marshall has integrity as a photographer—he never
allowed The Saturday Evening Post to print the shots he took of a
poverty-stricken family in Kentucky, even though he took them
on assignment for the magazine, because he was convinced the
writer condescended to the subjects. Instead, he gave them to
another magazine whose editor he respected. The most tormenting
photograph from that film is in the Smithsonian Institution’s
permanent collection.
“He spent hours, days, with his subjects,” writes Selvin. “They
became his friends. The battered Leica inevitably hanging around
his neck disappeared into the background and Marshall could quietly
pick up a camera and pull off a couple of private moments. It
was like he wasn’t there. His photographs show his subjects alone.”
There is one roll of film included in which Marshall did not
seem so alone, however, and that is his studio session with the
Grateful Dead in 1967. The band members dosed an unguarded
Marshall in the spirit of Ken Kesey’s acid tests. You can just imagine
them smirking expectantly at the photographer, waiting for
the drug to take effect.
$40, hardcover, 132 pages, Chronicle Books
ALL ACCESS: THE MAKING OF THIRTY EXTRAORDINARY GRAPHIC DESIGNERS
by Stefan G. Bucher
A look at the making of 15 giants of the graphic design industry—with examples of their pre-famous work as well as their greatest hits. Not every design genius was simply born knowing they’d be a great designer, Bucher proves in All Access.
We almost lost Stefan Sagmeister to a career in engineering, but thanks to his long hair and affinity for rock music he felt out
of place and eventually got a job designing a left-wing quarterly. James Victore was enthralled with the idea of drawing naked ladies, so he went to (and soon dropped out of) SVA—at least he met his mentor Paul Bacon there, or he would never have gone on to become one of the school’s most invigorating instructors. Margo Chase thought she’d be a veterinarian at first, then a medical illustrator —she was good at drawing bones, not designing—until she chanced upon some design classes and got a few breaks from the right people. Paula Scher says she wanted to be a “singer-dancer-piano player-bareback
rider” before she went on to design the cover of Boston’s self-titled album in 1976 and started moving up in the world. You get the idea.
True to his careful nature (in the STEP Field Guide to Emerging Design Talent 2004, we learned that disregard for detail drives him crazy), Bucher doesn’t stop there. He also investigates 15 designers who have yet to hit rock-star status, revealing their visual histories as well.
From the earliest, often bad creations to the most exceptional designs, Bucher shows how these 30 noteworthy designers
got there. “Good news: They weren’t born brilliant,” he writes. “They didn’t radiate genius the minute they picked up
a pencil. … There is hope.”
$40, hardcover, 208 pages, Rockport Publishers
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