Big Star are unusual, in the history of pop and rock music, for a sense of the visual, expressed in portraits of the band, both distinctive and elite. The best portraits of Big Star in Memphis in the early Seventies can compete as possibly the most refined, artistically elevated portraits of a rock band of all time. The mood of the portraits is foreboding, dusky, ghostly, even macabre. Yet there's a strange sense of wonder to the portraits, of something evanescent captured, difficult to define.
It can't be an accident that Alex Chilton's mother ran an art gallery out of the Chilton house, where Alex lived too, during the Big Star era. Alex Chilton's good art karma dictated that when Big Star were photographed, it was by seriously motivated photographers with serious intentions, who were unwilling to settle for visual cliches. The eerie glamour and singularity of the shots build around Big Star a mystique, visible only to those sensitive to visual art, but potent nonetheless.
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