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Tom Wright studied photography in London in the early sixties and spent several years in Europe supporting himself through freelance work for other artists. In 1967 he went on his first rock-n-roll tour and for the next thirty years traveled with many bands including The Who, Rod Stewart, Rolling Stones, Joe Walsh, Fabulous Thunderbirds, J.D. Souther, Patsy Torres, Firefall, and many others.
Wright is unique because he was not a “Rock” photographer sent by the record company to get a quick shot of this or that band. He was already with the bands, traveling as friend, unofficial photographer, and tour manager. His perspective is from the inside looking out, with more candid images made back stage than on stage. His photos are the real thing.
“My collection is housed in the Center for American History at the University of Texas in Austin where it is available for research. Original prints have sold at Christies, London and in private galleries. The museum quality prints available here, now, are made from digitized negatives and are printed on the highest quality fiber art paper. I personally over see, approve, and sign each print.”
Tom and Pete
Tom Wright, an American, and Pete Townshend, an Englishman, met at Ealing Art School in the fall of 1961 and, unbeknownst to them at the time, planted the seeds for Tom’s photographs and for Townshend’s musical career. The decade from 1961 to 1970 was a period of enormous artistic discovery and experimentation. It is now fashionable for certain cultural and political critics to trash the Sixties, to blame the period for later excesses and social ills. To do so is to miss the energizing elements that emerged from the decade, above all the change in the arts, the breaking down of old barriers between the “high arts” and “pop culture,” between “classical music” and “rock”, between “grand opera” and rock performance.”
Wright introduced Townshend to American blues, R&B, and jazz; together at Ealing they explored the newly emerging inter-media forms of expression, the hybrid forms of the arts that would come to fruition later in the decade. The atmosphere at Ealing encouraged thinking across boundaries, an open-minded attitude about the arts. Peter Blake’s pop art images, auto-destructive art, experimentalism in music, and the immediacy of photographic images were all available to Wright and Townshend, as they were to other British musicians who went to Art Schools, notably Ray Davies and John Lennon. What emerged from this cultural and social mix was a new sense of artistic freedom. Energized by Rock and Roll, fascinated by the electronic media forms that were becoming the daily language of their generation, the musicians would become increasingly creative and experimental in fusing old and new.
Even in the early years of The Who, Townshend focused on how things looked, as well as how they sounded. He was concerned with performance in the largest sense. Wright’s photographs were often used as immediate feedback, developed and printed right after performances, then shown to Townshend, who was in the process of molding a public identity for The Who.
[1] Joseph E. Kruppa, PH.D. is a Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. A longer version of the above article appeared in 1994 at the time of an exhibition of Wright’s photographs in Austin in conjunction with the touring production of Townshend’s rock opera, Tommy. The exhibition, entitled Who Rocked for Ages: The Photographs of Tom Wright, traveled to the Los Angeles Universal Amphitheatre after its viewing in Austin.
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