Rolling Stone photographer who captured classic images of the most influential musicians of the 1960s and 70s
Almost as much as the music, the mystique of rock’s golden age resides in the timeless images captured by the photographers of the era. One of rock’n’roll’s pioneering lensmen was Baron Wolman, who was the first staff photographer for Rolling Stone magazine when it launched in San Francisco in 1967. It typified the anarchic spirit of the time that Wolman’s initial assignment for the magazine was to photograph the Grateful Dead, in the aftermath of their arrest by a squad of narcotics agents.
Wolman, who has died in New
Mexico aged 83, later reflected that “everyone was approachable and appreciative in those days”, and with his wife Juliana (nee Sakowsky), a dancer he had met at university and married in 1963, lived in the same Haight-Ashbury district as the Grateful Dead and many other luminaries of San Francisco’s 1967 Summer of Love. Just as the
music was in a state of fevered self-invention, so was the art of photographing the artists and their audiences, and Wolman enjoyed a level of access to his subjects that would become impermissible as music turned into a huge business controlled by contracts and lawyers. “It went from an intimate experience to being a major corporate experience,” Wolman noted.