24 New Polaroids! + Others

[LineInTheSand]

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/20...er=rss&emc=rss

The Morrison Hotel Gallery, which specializes in music photography – not only photographs of musicians, but also photography by musicians – will present a show of self-portraits by Stevie Nicks from between 1975 and 1987. The pictures for the show were selected by Dave Stewart, the Eurythmics guitarist, who co-produced her “In Your Dreams” album.

The show, called “24 K Gold” – also the name of Ms. Nicks’s new album (a version of which will come with a book of Ms. Nicks’s photographs) – is devoted entirely to selfies taken in the wee hours of the night, both at home and on tour, using Polaroid cameras.

Why self-portraits?

“I wanted to learn how to become a photographer,” Ms. Nicks said in comments forwarded by her spokeswoman, Liz Rosenberg. “And I don’t sleep at night, so I thought, who am I going to ask to stay up all night, and then do a show tomorrow? So I’m not going to get Christine,” she said, referring to Christine McVie, her colleague in Fleetwood Mac. “She’s going to say, ‘Are you crazy? I’m going to the bar. Bye.’”

In search of variety, Ms. Nicks used props and costumes, often tinkering with lighting and placement through the night. “I did everything,” she said. “I was the stylist, the makeup artist, the furniture mover, the lighting director — it was my joy. I was the model.”

She continued taking self-portraits for more than a decade, until, as she put it, “the Polaroids were just almost impossible to use, because there was just no more film and they all broke down.”

The pictures have not been exhibited before. Mostly, Ms. Nicks said, they were stored in shoeboxes, where she filed them soon after taking them.

The exhibition will be at 201 Mulberry Street on Oct. 10 and 11, and will move to the Morrison Hotel Gallery at 116 Prince Street on Oct. 13, where it will run for the rest of October.