carinthia.qxp_Layout 1 21/05/2021 09:43 Page 1
CITY | EXHIBITIONS
Friends, not f-stops
Model, actress and IT girl of the 1970s, Carinthia West always had her camera with her. She also had some very cool and rather famous friends, including Mick Jagger, Ronnie Wood, Eric Idle, Helen Mirren and Anjelica Huston. A selection of her portraits are currently being shown at the Shooting Stars exhibition at the American Museum & Gardens, which runs until 31 October. By Emma Clegg
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e weren’t doing something for Instagram. If we looked like s**t in the photograph, either you didn’t print it or if it was a Polaroid you tore it up. Nowadays it goes round the world in three seconds,” says Carinthia West. Yes, times have changed. As have the faces in the photographs. Carinthia is referring to the 1970s – the decade provided a real-life setting for many of us, but it has now fallen into a retro dream with a golden glow of bell-bottoms, hot pants and platforms, and has become a vintage source of fascination. Well you can chase this dream right now with a visit to the American Museum & Gardens and their new exhibition Shooting Stars: Carinthia West, Britain and America in the 1970s, a collection of 63 intimate natural portraits and lifestyle shots taken in America and the UK, running until 31 October. Carinthia West was rarely seen without her Canon camera in the 1970s and ’80s, and because of the company she kept – with close friends including Mick Jagger, Ronnie Wood, George Harrison, Eric Idle, Shelley Duvall, Helen Mirren and Anjelica Huston – her photographs are a constant source of fascination. But she wasn’t an ambitious tagger-on, a groupie or a career photographer seeking out the company of these stars – she just liked taking pictures of her friends. BELOW: Mick Jagger, Jesse Wood and Ronnie Wood, Malibu, California 1977. “This is one of several photographs I took of Ronnie and Mick clowning around with Ronnie’s newly born son, Jesse. Life with Mick and Ronnie was exactly this; full of jokes, snatches of song, and camaraderie. “
“We were very lucky because there wasn’t much self-consciousness around. With fashion, for example, at school we just pulled everything together out of our mothers’ and grandmothers’ cupboards and pulled our skirts up when we left the school gates. “And it was all style that was unpretentious fun and it didn’t have any strictures on it. For example I used to wear red fox as a hat with the eyes of the fox and a tail. My grandmother was horrified and told me that’s what tarts wore in the ’20s and ’30s. And now everybody would be horrified for a different reason, and quite rightly. My grandmother always used to say to me, ‘stop making such an exhibition of yourself’.” Everyone is now a photographer because it’s so shoot and aim, voilà. But in the ’70s a Canon needed a level of technical expertise, right? Carinthia’s style was not driven by technical advancements, however. “I started with a Box Brownie and then I had a Konika and then a Canon and I stuck with Canon because they are great cameras. I had a wonderful Canon that sadly got stolen with a lucky red strap, an EF (electro-focus) camera. “I always use natural light, I never had lights or a studio. I am a great admirer of photographers like Jacques Lartigue or more modern photographers like Bailey, but there was less contrivance in those days. “I had a boyfriend in the early 1970s, my first great love. He was a singer songwriter, an amazing guy called Gary Farr [a British folk/blues singer and founder and lead vocalist of the T-Bones].
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