Vinyl and the Lens on Melrose, Wrensilva Shows Linda McCartney’s Album Photography
Linda McCartney’s photographs hang beside the records they graced in West Hollywood, with a Wrensilva console on hand to play them.
On September 25, Wrensilva Los Angeles, the audio company’s West Hollywood showroom and listening space at 8625 Melrose Avenue, unveiled The Art of the Album, an installation of Linda McCartney’s music photography made in collaboration with the Linda McCartney Estate and MPL Communications. It runs through February 2027.
The format is tactile. Her photographs hang beside the vinyl records they appeared on, and visitors can play music from the era on a Wrensilva console, including The Beatles, Paul McCartney, The Pretenders, Professor Longhair and Neil Young. “The idea is to bring people into the creative journey that surrounds the music,” Greg Perlot, the company’s CEO, told Wallpaper.
Perlot singled out the cover of Paul McCartney’s 1970 solo record, McCartney, shot during a family holiday in Antigua in 1969, and Professor Longhair’s Live on the Queen Mary. “Some of these photographs became the cover,” he said. “Some lived quietly inside the sleeve, found only by the listener who opened it.”
Her reputation came early. In 1967 she was named U.S. female photographer of the year, and her portrait of Eric Clapton made her the first female photographer to have an image on the cover of Rolling Stone, in 1968. Pete Townshend, Jim Morrison, B.B. King, Jackson Browne and Janis Joplin all passed through her lens. “Most of the people she photographed were already in her circle,” Perlot said, “not assignments she was sent to cover.”
The opening shared its date with the U.S. Postal Service’s first-day-of-issue ceremony at MoMA in New York for a limited-edition stamp series featuring her photography. The Melrose space is open Monday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
