Snapshot: Paul McCartney, David Gilmour and Linda McCartney

The scale of Paul McCartney's fame makes it easy to forget that he inhabited a specific social world with specific people in it. The photograph of McCartney, Linda McCartney, and David Gilmour together is from that social world — the community of British rock musicians who were famous enough that their interactions with each other happened largely outside public view.

The three subjects

Paul McCartney's post-Beatles career extended from Wings through decades of solo work. His critical reputation went through a long period of dismissal before being reassessed — a pattern that affected many artists from his generation whose work didn't fit the critical frameworks of the decades immediately following. The music he made with Linda McCartney in the Wings period has been revisited and found to contain more than the initial reception suggested.

Linda McCartney is a figure whose reputation rests on multiple things: her photography, which documented the rock world of the 1960s with the access only available to someone who was genuinely part of it; her marriage and musical partnership with Paul; and her advocacy work, which she pursued with consistency throughout her life.

David Gilmour is the guitarist and one of the principal songwriters of Pink Floyd from the mid-1970s onward. His playing style is one of the most widely recognized in rock — the particular tone, the particular use of sustained notes and space, the way his playing defines the emotional register of the music around it.

What the photograph contains

The three of them together in one frame produces something interesting: a reminder that the figures who defined British rock music of the 1970s were also people who knew each other, who were at the same parties, who appear in each other's photographs.

Snapshot entries at this site use photographs as entry points into larger histories. The McCartney, Gilmour, and Linda McCartney photograph is an entry into the informal social history of British music in the era when the records being made in London were among the most influential in the world.

The photograph shows them as people. That's the point of the snapshot entries: to find, in the informal visual record, the humanity that the larger cultural record sometimes obscures.

Browse the full Snapshots archive.