By now the haunting and touching Annie Leibowitz photographs that formed John’s last photo shoot are very familiar to most. Less familiar to me was this set by Allen Tannenbaum.
I can’t really describe what it is about Tannenbaum’s photos but they have this color austerity that I find so perfectly redolent of films and photography of the early 1980’s. Films like After Hours and One From The Heart. In contrast to the striking Leibowitz image there’s a levity at work in these, yet there’s the same naked honesty, the same intimacy.
The parallel statements between the visual language in these photographs and the music John and Yoko had just finished on Double Fantasy is unmistakable. I look at them and find myself daydreaming about the person John might be if he were alive today; how he and Yoko would be ambassadors of a provocative and honest marriage of love and art. It’s inspiring.
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Thanks for showing these photos, which I had never seen before (or heard about). I like that you included one that shows love and joy, and one that shows the opposite - a little stress and uncertainty in their eyes and faces - an honest display of being in their “only don’t know” space. They were the living example of letting go of pretenses and being exactly who they were. I love that John chose to raise Sean and let Yoko go to work. He said he may not have given birth to him, but he made his bones and everything, because he’s the one who fed him, and fed him, and took care of him.
Whoops, should have just fed him once!
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