Linda still causing ripples

Linda McCartney was a woman of many talents.

She is remembered as an earth mother, vegetarian, animal-rights campaigner and sometime musician.

But before all of this came her photography, celebrated in the new exhibition of her work Light From Within.

She honed her eye in New York snapping legends such as Hendrix, Joplin and the Rolling Stones during the Sixties.

Contrast those heady days with intimate family portraits of the McCartney clan at play - a relaxed world of Paul, ponies and kids.

Her career started in 1966 when the then-receptionist pinched an invitation to a Rolling Stones floating press trip and found herself the only photographer on board; then, of course, she married Paul McCartney in 1969.

Successful celebrity photographers always experience the conflict between life and art - do they like my photo, or do they just like who I'm photographing?

But this exhibition, from the book of the same name which Linda was preparing in the two years before her death in 1998, shows the gap between snapping famous musicians and photographing a husband who happens to be the most famous musician of all.

Her quirky, irreverent outlook suited photographs of domesticity far more than glitterati. The result is the story of a life - family, friends - that should remove any lingering doubts over whether Linda wanted Paul for what he represented, or for what he was.

Light From Within
Until March 2
Hacklebury Fine Art, 4 Launceston Place, W8
10am-5pm Tuesday-Saturday
Tel: 020 7937 8688.
Tube: Gloucester Road

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