Big Day Out photo exhibition

Mart Gallery

Another really cool photo exhibition happening at the moment is the Tony Mott & Sophie Howarth. A Big Day Out Retrospective. Basically, it’s a collection of photographs from Australia’s favourite festival, Big Day Out, taken by two of Australia’s most renowned music photographers, Tony Mott and Sophie Howarth. The spectrum of musicians captured on camera is very impressive. From our own Magic Dirt, Silverchair, The Dirty Three to international superstars like The Ramones, Nirvana, Rage Against The Machine, Bjork, Iggy Pop, PJ Harvey and the list goes on and on.

The exhibition runs until Saturday 30 January and is free. Mart Gallery is at 156 Commonwealth Street in Surry Hills.

Rock loyalty snapshots land at Blender

Pattie Boyd and George Harrison

Blender Gallery in Paddington is hosting a photo exhibition by Patti Boyd, former wife of George Harrison and Eric Clapton. Labeled one of the original 1960’s ‘it girls’—or what we would now call a ‘celebrity’—Boyd was a model, a photographer and a columnist. Having lived in the most creative music period, she is believed to have been the inspiration of a number of classic songs, most notably Harrison’s Something, For You Blue, and Clapton’s Layla, Wonderful Tonight and Bell Bottom Blues.

She married Harrison in 1966 after meeting him on the set of A Hard Day’s Night movie. Many say it was her growing interest in Eastern philosophy, that ispired The Beatles’ subsequent exploration of transcendental meditation and the 1968 visit to the Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Harrison and Boyd divorced in 1977, and two years later, she married Eric Clapton, who had long been in love with Boyd—Layla the ultimate symbol to their unrewarded love. Boyd was with Clapton through his alcohol and heroin addiction, before they split at the end of the 1980’s. The two are still friends, and she also remained close to Harrison until his death in 2001.

Boyd has documented these happenings since the late 1960’s. Through The Eyes Of A Muse—Photographs By Pattie Boyd is an opportunity to take an intimate look at some epoch-making lives and times, seen through the eyes of an ultimate insider. The exhibition is on until Thursday 24 December at the Blender Gallery.