A Tribute to Neil Young: The Pictures
A picture book tribute — Neil Young in photographs across five decades, the visual record of a career without a comparable counterpart.
Neil Young has been photographed since the early 1960s, which means there is a visual record of the career that spans fifty years and several distinct periods. The picture book tribute collects some of what that record contains.
The early photographs
The photographs from Young's Winnipeg period and the early Buffalo Springfield years show a young musician in the visual language of the mid-1960s folk and rock scene: the clothes, the hair, the staging conventions of the period. Young looks young in these photographs, which is obvious, but there is also something in them of someone who has not yet been shaped by the decades of recognition that followed.
The Buffalo Springfield photographs from 1966 and 1967 are particularly interesting because the group's internal dynamic — the creative tension between Young and Stephen Stills — is sometimes readable in the body language of the posed photographs. The group that produced "For What It's Worth" and "Expecting to Fly" looked, in the press photographs, like any other California rock group of the period. The photographs don't tell you what the records tell you.
The Harvest period
The photographs from the Harvest era are among the most widely circulated of any period in Young's career. The ranch setting — the Northern California property where much of the album was recorded — provides a visual context that matches the pastoral aesthetic of the music. Young in these photographs looks like the music sounds: rural, deliberate, unhurried.
These are the pictures that established the visual vocabulary for what Young would represent: the serious acoustic musician, the artist with a relationship to the land, the person whose music was about something real rather than something manufactured.
The Crazy Horse photographs
The electric Young in the Crazy Horse photographs is a different person — or the same person in a different mode. The stage photographs from the Rust Never Sleeps and Re-ac-tor and Ragged Glory periods show the guitar-forward, loud, unconcerned with polish version of the career.
Both the acoustic and the electric Young are present in the full visual record, and the relationship between them — the same person, the same career, very different sounds — is one of the things the photographs document.
What the pictures say
The visual tribute is an opportunity to look at a career that has been long enough and various enough to contain multitudes. Young is sixty-three in 2009 and shows no signs of stopping. The photographs from across the career show someone who has been consistently himself despite — or through — very different musical phases.
This consistency is unusual in a career of this length. The photographs document it.
See the Picture Book archive.