Art: Rock photo exhibition - Elvis, Dylan, Beatles, more - rolls into Allentown Art Museum

Rock-and-roll music embodies the spirit of several generations, which is to say raucous and sometimes transgressive behavior by both musicians and their fans, idol worship and mass hysteria.

These effects have been observed before, particularly in young people - remember crooners and bobby-soxers? - but rock-and-roll has been an especially persistent and powerful shaper of popular culture. Why else would public television still be reviving musical acts from the 1960s to solicit contributions during periodic fund drives?

Now rock-and-roll has invaded the art museum, which you might not think would be a congenial venue for an art form that represents the antithesis of quiet, solitary contemplation.

Photography provides the link. "Who Shot Rock & Roll" at the Allentown Art Museum manages to tame the beast through 175 photographs without compromising its animal vitality.

The show was organized by guest curator Gail Buckland for the Brooklyn Museum, which hasn't been reluctant in recent years to challenge art-museum conventions in order to attract younger visitors.

"Who Shot Rock & Roll," based on a Buckland book published in 2009, is a classic of its type - a show aimed at people who might never have set foot in an art museum, or thought of doing so.

Its appeal is also based primarily on the people photographed, not necessarily the skill and reputation of the photographers.

Just about every rock-and-roll headliner of the last half-century shows up here, from Elvis, Dylan and the Beatles to Madonna and Michael Jackson.

So besides being a social-cultural documentary, the show serves up a supersized helpiing of nostalgia for music fans of several generations.

That isn't to say that it's frivolous or lacking in aesthetic gravity and professional polish. More than 100 photographers are represented. Probably most visitors will recognize only a relative few, such as Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, and Annie Leibovitz.

Yet even these familiar names don't overshadow the personalities of the artists, especially those, such as the Rolling Stones, who inhabit popular music's Mount Rushmore.

The exhibition sprawls through three galleries on the museum's second floor, so it requires time and stamina to cover fully. Buckland has organized it in six thematic sections: career beginnings; performance; crowds and fans; portraits; intimate "behind-the-scenes" pictures; and album covers/conceptual images.

As in life, not all musicians are created equal. The biggest stars - Elvis, Dylan, the Stones - enjoy the heaviest coverage. Oddly, the 1969 Woodstock festival, a landmark event not just in popular music but in American culture, isn't represented.

The exhibition does include a half-dozen video clips, distributed throughout the installation. Some are performances, which visitors can listen to, thankfully, through headphones.

Except for the album covers, I would venture that most of the images in "Who Shot" will be discoveries for most visitors, even aficionados. There's not a lot of high art, but there is considerable variety covering an extensive time period.

The show doesn't have a focal point, so I'll mention a few things that caught my eye, for various reasons, beginning with a startling image of Mick Jagger.

British photographer Albert Watson merged Jagger's face with that of a leopard; the synthesis is not only perfect technically, but an apt psychological portrait. (Whether intentionally or not, Watson reprised a famous 1932 photo by Italian Wanda Wulz, who blended her own face with that of her cat.)

For backstage intimacy, nothing else in the show surpasses Ian Tilton's picture of a distraught Kurt Cobain sobbing moments after he had smashed a guitar during a performance. Cobain, you recall, eventually killed himself, and we look at this picture through that lens.

The zeitgeist, and the spirit of this exhibition, can be neatly summarized by two large photographs in the crowds-and-fans section.

One, by Charles Peterson, documents a mosh pit at a music festival in Washington state in 1991. Like a war photographer, Peterson probably risked injury to record such a dramatic image.

The other is a large color composite of Madonna performing in Los Angeles in 2001. It is the work of the German artist Andreas Gursky, known for complex photomontages, in which he amplifies the character of a place or event by replicating sections of the original photo.

In this example, Madonna isn't immediately visible because Gursky has made the crowd his subject; it fills the picture field from side to side, top to bottom. The singer is reduced to a tiny figure, albeit spotlit, in the lower left.

By letting the crowd dominate, Gursky emphasizes the important role that audiences play in transforming performance into spectacle.

In this image, one immediately understands that often with rock-and-roll, the performer becomes like a cork bobbing on an ocean of emotion and adulation.

If "Who Shot Rock & Roll" doesn't drain all your energy, the museum has put up several other smaller shows that deserve attention.

One of these, "Gothic to Goth," examines public expressions of mourning that developed in the 19th century, encouraged in part by the Romantic movement.

The focus here is on elaborate black mourning dresses and matching accessories such as fans, a lace parasol cover, and needlework mourning pictures, often created by young women.

This is a small display, but so elegant and tastefully installed that it generates a powerfully elegiac mood. Most of the exhibits are, of course, black; the light rose color of the gallery walls gives them unusual dramatic force. It's not at all sad, but actually uplifting.

Photographer Lydia Panas, who lives in nearby Kutztown, is showing a group of large color photographs - group portraits of children and adults, relatives, and people she knows.

These are ambitious studies because Panas asks her subjects to reveal subtleties of character and relationships to each other - by the way they pose themselves in their outdoor surroundings.

With this kind of portraiture, it's difficult to achieve a result that feels, to the viewer, authentically intimate and honest. Too often what we get instead is staginess and self-consciousness.

Panas' photos, full of deadpan expressions, tend to straddle this divide. Depending on the viewer's mood and how much time he or she invests, the portraits can seem either insightful or bland.

Perhaps if they were displayed in a larger room, with more space between, they would express themselves more effectively.

"Who Shot Rock & Roll" continues at the Allentown Art Museum, 31 N. Fifth St., through May 13. "Gothic to Goth" continues through April 29 and "Lydia Panas: The Mark of Abel" through April 15.

Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, noon to 5 Sundays. Admission is $12 general and $10 for seniors, students, and visitors six to 12. 610-432-4333 or www.allentownartmuseum.org.

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