October 19: This daily blog is often written ‘live’ – a deadline gets me going!  I had been preparing notes around some of the issues coming up in the Daguerreian Society’s 19th-century Photography Conference and Show October 19-23 2016, especially since recently retired Chairperson of Sotheby’s New York Photographs Department, Denise Bethel, is to be speaking today on Resurrecting the Important: How the 19th Century Might Save Contemporary Photography, which I think you would agree is a provocative title…can’t wait to find out how that might be done!

That was to lead here into a consideration of how the role of the collector of photographs, and particularly of photographs in books, figures in the history of photography and in promoting photography’s current acceptance as an art form. There’ll be plenty of opportunity for that in another post. In the meantime you can listen yourself to Bethel speaking informatively on such topics by going to this video of her lecture From Book Object to Art Object: Some Observations on the Origins of the Photographs Market presented at the Frick Collection on Saturday, May 9, 2015, part of the symposium Seen through the Collector’s Lens: 150 Years of Photography presented by the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Collection on Friday and Saturday, May 8–9, 2015.

But today, I’m suffering from a bad cold, so let’s simply celebrate the UK release date, today in 1973, of Ringo Starr’s single, ‘Photograph’; it’s a poignant song, with a simple story of an abandoned lover whose only memento of his failed relationship is a photograph.

Starr made a promotional film for “Photograph” in the grounds of Tittenhurst Park in Sunninghill near Ascot, Berkshire, the 72-acre estate that he had recently purchased from John Lennon who had left for New York, never to return to England. Tittenhurst was where the last pictures of the Beatles were made by Californian Ethan Russell and Englishman Monte Fresco. Russell, at 23 years old, had stumbled into the rock photography scene in London right at the top through his meeting with Mick Jagger in 1968.

The next year he had been commissioned by the Beatles to illustrate the cover of Let It Be, featuring a quartet of separate portraits.  The older photographer there at Tittenhurst was Monte Fresco, a tough East Ender and a veteran of Fleet Street who became better known for his sports photography noted for its comic qualities. Additional pictures were taken by The Beatles’ assistant Mal Evans, while Linda McCartney, then heavily pregnant, shot some film.

Back to ‘Photograph’, which in part was recorded with Ringo singing and playing the drums and George Harrison on guitar, at Tittenhurst where Lennon had set up a recording studio. The pair had begun writing “Photograph” on a luxury yacht in the South of France in May 1971 with a number of visitors contributing to the lyrics.

Seasoned, 52 year-old Hollywood and rock photographer Barry Feinstein took the single’s sleeve photo; an iconic and rather comic image of Starr’s head poking through a star formed by his arms and legs under shiny mylar. The space blanket material was a hot product amongst photographers at the time for its distorting reflections. I remember Athol Smith using it his colour homages to Andre Kertesz’s Anamorphics nudes. Here it is used to turn Starr into a glitzy icon based on his name and with a nod to his showy public image; he was just getting into acting during this period.

The album’s release followed in November 1973 with Photograph appearing as the third track. In the grab below from Starr’s (deliberately?) amateurish promotional film for Photograph (featuring a gorilla and David Bowie), he places his hand over his mouth ironically as he mimes to the song as ‘no-lip-service’ to the BBC’s ban on lip-synching.