I was there... really

Yesterday I made it to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. It’s full of music and a bunch of very cool artifacts, as one would expect, but again, you’re not allowed to take pictures. The signs say it’s because the people that have loaned some of the stuff don’t want it photographed. Ok, but then surely there are decent postcards, yes? Well, no. Only books. Books you really don’t want to buy because they are expensive and take up space in your bags, and are likely to put you in the paying more category when they weigh you in at the airport. Oh goody.

I really think it’s time for it this to end. Of the thousands of people who would make pictures in such a place, how many of them would actually make a profit from their images? A tenth of one percent? A hundredth? First of all, it isn’t possible to get a great photo of anything in this museum. The archivally dimmed lighting isn’t conducive to it, nor are the richly layered displays. Really, no one would pay you for that picture of John Lennon’s Sergeant Pepper’s uniform with the reflections bouncing off the glass case. You would need a tripod and carefully set strobe lighting to get close to a saleable picture. Yes, mad PhotoShop skills might save you, but it still would pale next to a well made shot.

The pictures that interest the common populace are the snapshots. Look Mabel, there’s Elvis’ Cadillac. Johnny, you wouldn’t believe how small Bruce Springsteen’s leather jacket is, you wouldn’t fit in it. Dude, they had the ZZ Top drums with the fur on them. Honey, can you believe all that spandex Freddie Mercury and David Bowie wore? Can you believe that we tried to wear it too? Of course, back in the days before we all had cellulite…

The images we want are point and shoot – literally. They are little flash cards to jog our memories. We shoot them so that we can take them home and point at them while we tell our stories about the hat that Aretha wore to the inauguration, or Les Paul’s first frankenstein’d Epiphone. Or we snap them at a whopping two whole megapixels on our cell phones to send that image of Jimmy Page’s violin bow instantaneously to the Led Zep fan in our circle, to let them know that we were thinking about them. Truly, these are not salable pix. We don’t crave the commerce, we crave the connections.

As you get in line to pay at the Rock Hall, there is a beleaguered young person with a camera, a green screen, and a ratty no-name guitar there, trying to get you to pose for a picture that they will later try to sell you, telling you that they like to photograph everyone who comes to their museum. In the lovely words of the British bloke next to me in line: If I can’t have a picture of their stuff, they can’t have one of me. Rock on, mate.