Rarely seen photographs of the Rolling Stones form an exhibition at Birmingham’s Snap Galleries. Sally Hoban takes a look.

Photographs of iconic sixties musicians are arguably just as important as their songs when it comes to how we remember them today. Think of the Beatles and the Sergeant Pepper album cover might spring to mind, Hendrix and you are more than likely to see a contorted figure bent double over a guitar and it’s pretty much impossible to think of The Doors without recalling the famous photo of Jim Morrison with his chest bared, leering out at the camera.

The work of photographers such as David Bailey and Linda McCartney is relatively well known today, but images taken by British photographer Michael Cooper and the French photographer Dominique Tarle in the 1960s and early 1970s haven’t received as much public exposure.

So Birmingham’s Snap Galleries are holding a selling exhibition of rarely seen photographs of the Rolling Stones taken by both Cooper and Tarle.

Their prints give us glimpses of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and their entourage in places we’ve never seen them before. It is wonderful to see photography of this quality and importance on show in Birmingham.

The exhibition, called Majesties and Exiles, has been organised in conjunction with Raj Prem Fine Art Photography. The title of the exhibition is drawn from the two Stones’ albums which are best associated with Cooper and Tarle’s work.

Cooper, who was a close friend of Keith Richards, shot the cover of Their Satanic Majesties Request in 1967, and Tarle accompanied the band and their friends when they were recording Exile On Main Street in 1971 at the Villa Nellcôte on the French Riviera.

Guy White, director at Snap Galleries, says: “While photographs of the Rolling Stones have appeared piecemeal in a number of our exhibitions over the years, this will actually be our first dedicated to the band.

“It is very unusual for a single exhibition to be split equally between the work of two photographers, but it struck me that their archives were so complementary, with many consistent threads, synergies, and characters running between them, that it made perfect sense.

“Dominique and Michael are both extremely important photographers who were part of a seminal Rolling Stones era that is respected and revered by the band and their fans. Both photographic archives have been the subject of landmark books which are now sold out or unavailable but we will have a few copies of both at the gallery during the exhibition.”

Photographers like Cooper and Tarle who were given intimate access to the most famous sixties bands captured moments from their lives that no publicity photo could ever hope to reproduce. There are pictures here of band members relaxing, sitting cross legged in the sun and even having breakfast.

“There’s a fly on the wall character to both sets of pictures, which are almost exclusively shot in black and white,” says Guy.

Michael Cooper photographed the cover for The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, and it was this that inspired his later cover shot for the Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request.

You can see this colourful, psychedelic photograph in the exhibition along with images of the Stones in London, at Stonehenge and on holiday in California and Morocco. Marianne Faithful makes an appearance too.

Tragically, Michael Cooper took his own life in 1973 at the age of just 31. When he died he left an archive of over 70,000 images to his son Adam, along with a note saying ‘they will eventually be worth something.’

About 600 of the photographs were published in the now unavailable book Blinds And Shutters in 1989, but most of them have never been seen, much less exhibited.

The Satanic Majesties cover was taken using a special 3-D camera in New Jersey. It captures the band’s love of dressing up in exotic costumes, as does the image of Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenburg on the set of the film Performance.

This is a great photograph. Pallenburg lies languidly on a bed, cigarette in hand and dressed in an oversized, sparkling turban while Mick Jagger sits behind her, staring intensely at the viewer from a shadowed background.

Keith Richards talked about the process of making the Satanic Majesties cover in Blinds and Shutters. “I remember going to Manhattan on a Sunday, trying to buy all the plants and going to the costume place,” he said.

“Michael was being incredibly fussy about which plants he’d like. We went to the studios with spray cans and made the whole thing ourselves and we made our own set for the album cover – so different from The Beatles with Sergeant Pepper. It was like, “Got the glue?”, “Can I have the saw when you’ve finished with it Michael?” and bits of Styrofoam – like two or three days of handicrafts. We kept popping out and buying things when we ran out.”

It is the informality of Cooper’s pictures that make them so appealing. This is perhaps epitomised in the image of Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg standing back to back holding hands as she bursts out laughing.

I also really like Cooper’s photograph of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards loitering either side of an advertising hoarding featuring a Palace Guardsman holding a bottle of milk. This photograph is the perfect symbol of the band’s rebellion against the English establishment.

Cooper also took photographs of the band during trips to the desert. In Blinds and Shutters, Keith recalls that: “We were looking for UFOs and Joshua trees. The thing about Michael was that when these expeditions were going on, he’d be very unobtrusive. We’d all be looning and he’d be working.”

Mick Jagger once said: “Michael Cooper … was never without a camera and even though at the time I would feel I was permanently on show when he was around, looking back I’m glad he captured this period with his brilliant pictures.”

Dominique Tarle’s images pick up chronologically where Cooper’s leave off, when the Stones were at the Villa Nellcôte in France. Keith Richards was living there with Anita Pallenberg and their son Marlon.

The Exile On Main Street album was made at the Villa with the help of a mobile recording truck connected to a basement studio.

Tarle’s achingly cool images capture the sun-soaked languor of that summer as well as unseen moments in Anita Pallenberg and Keith Richards’ relationship.

The Villa Nellcôte was certainly a colourful place to be. In an interview published in French Marie Claire in June 2002, Pallenberg recalled how: “The doors … were open day and night. Mainly because we did not have the keys. We searched for them. We never found them.”

Dominique Tarle told more of the story in the New York Times: “A carnival of characters paraded through: Terry Southern, Gram Parsons, John Lennon, even a tribal band from Bengal… dope dealers from Marseille; petty thieves, who stole most of the drugs and half the furniture; and hangers-on, all of them there to witness what was happening.”

Tarle’s images of Keith playing his guitar at the Villa Nellcôte are some of the most evocative in the exhibition.

In an interview with Stones News in August 2001, Tarle recalled that: “There was no radio, no stereo at the beginning… so it was Keith unplugged all day long. From early in the morning to late at night. A true delight.”

* Majesties and Exiles runs until November 15 at the Snap Galleries, Fort Dunlop, Birmingham. All the images are available for sale through the Gallery. For further information and prices visit snapgalleries.com.