April 2009
Responding to the flood of traffic to their inaugural exhibition, Not Fade Away Gallery has announced it will extend the Bob Bonis photography show, "The British Are Coming: The Beatles and The Rolling Stones 1964-66".
Not Fade Away Gallery, the new fine art photography gallery (12 East 20th Street, 2nd floor), opened with a bang on March 4th with a VIP reception hosted by Keith Richards' daughters, Alexandra and Theodora, and attended by luminaries from the music, entertainment and art industries.
Since then, the public has turned out in force to view the show's 58 images (culled from an archive of 3500 photographs) taken by Bob Bonis, tour manager for both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones during their first tours of the U.S. in the 60s.
Documenting the critical point in the bands' careers when they first came to America, the exhibition features images of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones that demonstrate the level of access and trust Bob Bonis (1932-1991) established with the young men who became the most significant rock musicians of the 20th century.
Revealing a private, behind-the-scenes glimpse into the early days of rock 'n' roll, the photos show the boys in candid, intimate shots on stage, in rehearsal, in concert, backstage (tuning up, waiting to go on stage and clowning around), dressing and relaxing, on vacations or en route to shows or cities, getting haircuts, bowling, recording in the studio, at press events and just hanging around being themselves.
The provenance of the Bob Bonis archive, which came to light almost 45 years after the photographs were taken, makes for a fascinating story.
According to Not Fade Away Gallery co-founder/director Larry Marion, an acknowledged expert in the field of music memorabilia, "In more than twenty years as a rock 'archeologist,' I've never come upon a discovery of this magnitude. This is likely the largest single trove of such important unknown photographs ever uncovered."
For over forty years, the negatives and slides were safely stored away unknown to anyone but Bob Bonis' family. Bob's son Alex recently unearthed them and brought them--along with his father's collection of memorabilia from his Tour Manager days--to Larry Marion for appraisal.
In fact, the photos were at the bottom of a duffel bag of memorabilia--brought out almost as an afterthought. Now, Alex Bonis is one of the partners in Not Fade Away Gallery, which has begun to make these images available for exhibition and for sale as museum-quality fine art photographic prints (both black-and-white and color), in extremely limited editions, printed on era-appropriate paper, utilizing traditional photographic printing methods.
The Bob Bonis Archive is exclusively represented by the Not Fade Away Gallery.
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