Henry Diltz, sharp-eyed photographer to the boomer folk-rock stars, is anything but a war photographer, but he has built up an iconic body of work on the proverbial front lines. To be more specific, he was there on the “front lines” of counterculture turned mainstream pop culture in the late ’60s and early ’70s, capturing and staging imagery now deeply etched in the pop-culture collective unconscious.
As seen in Diltz’s latest local exhibition, Music Is Love, at Solvang’s Elverhøj Museum, images can suggest sounds and nostalgia and tickle other senses. Many of the show’s ultra-familiar images wound up on landmark pop albums — including the Crosby, Stills & Nash debut album, The Doors’ Morrison Hotel, James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James, and Stephen Stills’s first solo album. A tight shot of Paul and Linda McCartney, which landed on the cover of Life magazine in 1971, is another instantly recognizable and instantly lovable sight.
Seeing these pictures again in living, clean-printed color on a museum wall reflexively triggers musical memories. In fact, on the afternoon I visited the always-inviting museum, Diltz’s dreamy shot of the Bohemian-attired Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock resonated with the in-gallery sound of Hendrix’s dulcet-toned psychedelia, in the form of such songs as “Wait Until Tomorrow.”