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Let’s be honest. Most of us probably feel more at home in the mosh pit of a rock concert than in a posh, please-do-not-touch art gallery. In the ‘art vs music’ debate, it seems we’re way more in tune with pop stars than painters. But take a moment out of your headbanging to open your eyes – because the impact of visual arts on music has been huge. Art has created some of music’s most iconic images. From Andy Warhol to the Haus of Gaga, from music videos to music photography, SIOBHAN DOWNES investigates.

When Associate Professor Mark Stocker sets out to explain pop art to students in his 100 level Art History ‘Modern Art’ course, he starts off the lecture with a song. With British pop art, it’s The Who’s ‘My Generation’. With Andy Warhol, it’s Lou Reed’s ‘Take a Walk on the Wild Side’. “With pop art, the affinities with pop music are obvious, and I can’t imagine a 100 level lecture where you have one without the other,” he says.
 
Pop art, with its celebration of mass culture, commercialism and the gloss and glamour of the rich and the famous, emerged in the fabulous Fifties and the swinging Sixties. Then there was pop music, with the birth of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1958, LSD, and the formation of The Beatles in 1960. Both media were a reflection of youth and optimism – they were talkin’ about their generation. Gone were the dreary days of the war, and in were film stars and Coca Cola.
 
British pop artist Peter Blake characterizes the crossover between the two scenes. He was obsessed with the likes of Elvis, The Beatles and The Beach Boys, and they featured heavily in his artwork. Maybe you haven’t heard of Blake – but you’ve probably heard of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Clubs Band. And if you’ve seen that particular album cover, then you’ve seen one of Blake’s most iconic works.
 
Now let’s take a walk on the wild side to America, home of Andy Warhol – the ‘Pope of Pop’. He was David Bowie’s greatest inspiration, and Mick Jagger begged him to design one of the Rolling Stones’ album covers. Which he did. Sticky Fingers, featuring gay sex symbol Joe Dallesandro’s crotch, has been named one of the greatest album covers of all time. Warhol’s New York studio, known as The Factory, was frequented by some of the biggest names in the music industry at that time, and led to the formation of the cult band, The Velvet Underground.
 
To use pop art as one of the most prominent examples, visual art has had a huge influence on music, and vice versa. This is essentially what Professor Stocker argues. “I don’t see art and music as being ‘vs’ one another, but in a symbiotic relationship, even if by definition they are different media perceived through different senses.”
 
The distinction between these two senses – eyes and ears – when it comes to visual art and music is becoming more blurred than ever. This is the twenty-first century world where video has killed the radio star, and YouTube is killing the video star. With the ability to watch any musician playing anywhere in the world on the internet, the importance of the performance is almost surpassing that of the music, as it becomes more difficult for musicians to get noticed from the masses of material. They have to do something to stand out, and this is where visual arts come in. Even British singer Adele, who famously said she makes music for ‘ears, not eyes’ – is not immune to this; her music video for ‘Rolling in the Deep’ ended up winning Best Art Direction at the MTV Video Music Awards.
 
There is a woman who recently became the first musician to rack up over one billion views on YouTube with her outlandish performance art. While Andy Warhol may have been the Pope of Pop, the Queen of Pop of our time is surely Lady Gaga, and she is following in Warhol’s creative footsteps. We have seen her perform covered in blood, hatching from an egg, dressed as a wheelchair-bound mermaid, to name but a few of her incarnations. Behind all the meat dresses, penis shoes, hair bows and pyrotechnic bras are a dedicated team of artists. They are known as the Haus of Gaga, in a direct nod to Warhol’s Factory. It is art in every sense – and Lady Gaga herself is the easel. As she puts it, her and her ‘Haus’ are ‘changing the world – one sequin at a time.’
 
Perhaps the biggest indicator of the makings of a musical icon is being featured on the cover of Rolling Stone, something Lady Gaga has achieved three times. But the unsung heroes in the creation of music iconography are the music photographers. Would pop and rock music be where it was today if it wasn’t for the photographs that created sex symbols, captured great moments, and immortalised legends?
 
We talked to budding music photographer Ashleigh Inglis, who is about to graduate from the Dunedin School of Art with a Bachelor of Visual Arts in Photography. When she’s not behind the bar at Re:Fuel you’ll see her behind the camera lens, doing her thing on the side of the stage.
 
“Working at ReFuel opened me up to photographing a lot more bands, because I was able to meet more people,” she says. She’s also photographed Knives At Noon for Groove Guide, and been behind the scenes at iD Fashion Week, and Illuminate. “I really like doing the Illuminate Paint Parties because you get the whole thing - the music and culture, the people and the paint.”
 
She says she’s constantly “in limbo” between music and art. “I used to half-arsed play drums in high school, but what probably got me into music the most is that the majority of my friends are in bands, so I’d hang out with them and pick up their attitudes towards live music.”
 
Despite being an art school student, she understands why people would pick a rock concert over an art exhibition. “I love live music because it’s kind of an escape from the rigid ‘art’ side of things. It’s all about the atmosphere. A live gig is living and breathing – you’ve got people jumping around all happy, some might even be on drugs, you know? But when you go into a gallery, you’re confronted with a white wall that doesn’t really answer back to you.”
 
It’s the atmosphere of live music that she enjoys revealing through her photography. “I like capturing the moment. If they jump up in the air onstage you want to get that shot, because it captures the atmosphere. It’s like portraiture, except they’re playing music.”
 
One of the most iconic images in rock ‘n’ roll to be featured on the cover of Rolling Stone, that of Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar on fire at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, was captured in a moment. It was a fluke shot, taken by 17-year-old Ed Caraeff – who had never even heard of Hendrix before the concert – using the last shot of his film roll.
 
Most of the time though, Ashleigh explains, to get a great photograph takes preparation and dedication. “To do the band justice you have to see them more than once, so you can get an idea of the way the frontman and band members act. Then when you actually start photographing them, you kind of know what to expect. Certain bands have certain ways they go around the stage, certain lights they like, and so on. Like, they might be really active onstage, or just stand still and rock out. To get to know these things, there needs to be a mutual respect between the bands and the photographers.”
 
Hanging backstage at all the concerts, making friends with band members, taking photographs that might just make it onto the cover of Rolling Stone; it all sounds very Almost Famous. But before you don a camera, Penny Lane fur coat and pair of aviators, keep in mind that it’s not all sex, drugs and film rolls. As Ashleigh says, music photography is “a bit of a cult following... NME [magazine] recently ran amateur photography awards for live music, which I entered. But Dunedin and New Zealand are quite small in terms of bands that come and go, and when the bigger bands come, they’ll have their own photographers, so you can’t just rock up and start taking photos. It’s a small group of people.”
 
It’s this small group of artists who so often go unrecognised in the frontman-oriented world of rock music. But a touring museum exhibition currently making its way around America is setting out to bridge this divide between art and music. Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present, and the book by Gail Buckland that it was inspired by, puts music photographers back into the spotlight, showing how they were the ‘handmaidens to the rock-and-roll revolution’ – and rock music wouldn’t be the same without them. It is the first of its kind, and it’s a long time coming.
 
But for Ashleigh, there isn’t really any ‘music vs art.’ What it comes down to is just a love of all art – musicians and visual artists alike. “To a musician, music is their art, their way of expressing themselves. My art is photographing their art. That’s basically it.”