Wrensilva is proud to present "The Art of the Album: The Photography of Linda McCartney" at Wrensilva Los Angeles. Located at 8625 Melrose Ave., the gallery is open Monday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. This installation will be available for viewing through February 2027 and is brought to you in collaboration with The Linda McCartney Estate and MPL Communications.
Linda McCartney (then Linda Eastman) was not supposed to be there that day in 1966 when the Rolling Stones were hosting journalists on a Hudson River boat trip for the launch of their Aftermath album and tour in New York City. And yet, there she was–an editorial assistant at Town & Country magazine and aspiring photographer–camera in hand. She had never professionally taken a photograph before. Linda’s unscripted image of Mick Jagger and Brian Jones relaxing on the yacht would mark her first published photoshoot.
When other press photographers of the time wanted more standard, posed shots, Linda captured Jimi Hendrix yawning, Jagger and Jones reclining on a couch, Tim Buckley arms akimbo on a Central Park door stoop. Her photos were different – they were informal portraits, capturing a moment.
As the house photographer for the Fillmore East, Linda worked with some of the most legendary artists of our time. Pete Townshend, Jim Morrison, B.B. King, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, and Janis Joplin are just some of the faces caught in her lens–immortalized by her warm and personal style of photography.
Linda described her technique in a 1994 BBC interview, “I think you just feel it instinctively, you got to just click on the moment. Not before it and not after it. I think if you are worried about light meters and all that stuff, you just miss it. For me, it just came from my inners, as they say. Just excitement, I love it—I get very excited.”
Before she met and married Paul McCartney, Linda Eastman had already established herself as an artist and award-winning photographer.
In 1967, Linda was named U.S. female photographer of the year. Her portrait of Eric Clapton made her the first female photographer to have an image featured on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1968.
“One of the great things about Linda was she knew when to click,” Paul McCartney says in a 2019 interview with The Guardian, “it’s all about capturing that split-second. Linda could instinctively feel a moment happening.”
Linda documented ordinary moments of her extraordinary subjects. Sometimes these were snapshots of her own domestic life, full of love for her family; sometimes they were portraits that hinted at a crack in the mask of rock-star grandeur.
Some of these photographs became the cover. Some lived quietly inside the sleeve, found only by the listener who opened it. Some were taken in the middle of the work, before the album had a shape. She photographed people as she found them, not as they performed for the lens, and that instinct runs through all three. The photographs shown here are displayed next to the records that enshrined them at Wrensilva, Los Angeles, and are available to play on a Wrensilva console.
