The One Photograph of Janis Joplin That Shows Nothing of Her Face. And Everything Else. D

In 1968, a photographer took a picture of Janice Joplain in the middle of a concert that has been described by the people who have seen it as the most honest portrait ever taken of her. The photograph shows no face. It shows her from behind or from an angle so sharp that only fragments of her are visible.

The line of her shoulders under the fabric of whatever she was wearing, the back of her neck, the extension of one arm toward the microphone, the hair, the necklaces catching the stage light, the body in the specific posture of a person completely given over to what they are doing. The posture of someone who has in this moment no interior that is separate from the exterior.

Whose entire physical presence is organized around the act of transmission. No face, no expression to read, no eyes to meet, no smile or grimace or the specific controlled presentation of a face that knows it is being photographed. Just the body in performance seen from a direction that the performer would not have chosen to show from the angle that the performer never managed for the camera.

And the people who have seen it say that this is the most accurate photograph of Janice Joplain that exists. the one that shows who she actually was without the face because of the angle that required no face. The photographs of Janice Joplain that most people know are photographs of her face. Her face in performance.

The specific expression of someone singing with complete physical commitment. Mouth open, eyes closed or half closed. The face doing what faces do when the person behind them has stopped managing what the face is doing and has simply given over to the act of singing. These photographs are famous because they are genuinely extraordinary.

The face in that state is visually compelling in ways that are difficult to explain in purely formal terms. But they are also a particular kind of image. They are the face presenting something, presenting the singing, presenting the emotion, presenting the specific performance of complete immersion.

This is not dishonest. The immersion is real, but the photograph of the immersion is still a photograph, still a frame selected from a moment in time, still an image that the camera and the photographer and the post-p production process have shaped into the particular version of the moment that appears in print.

The photograph taken from behind or from the sharp side angle bypasses this entirely. There is no face to be managed. No expression to be presented, no version of the performance that the performer can offer to the camera from this direction. There is only the physical fact of the body in the act of singing, the posture, the movement, the specific geometry of a person completely occupied by what they are doing, not occupied by anything else.

What you see from behind a performing artist is what they look like when they are not thinking about how they look. It is the closest that a photograph can get to the actual person. Rock concert photography in 1968 was still developing its own grammar. The profession was not yet what it would become in the following decade.

It had not yet produced the canonical images that would later define what rock photography meant. Had not yet developed the full set of conventions that would govern how rock performers were depicted in the visual record. Photographers were still working out what they were doing and what it was for. The dominant mode was the performance shot, the photograph taken from the front of the stage or the photo pit, showing the performer from the audience’s perspective, capturing the face and the stance and the energy of the stage presence as it presented itself to the crowd. These were the photographs that ran in the music press that appeared on album sleeves that circulated in the culture as representations of what these performers looked like when they were doing what they were famous for. This made sense as a documentary approach. The face is where the performance is legible. The face shows

you what the performer wants you to see. the joy, the pain, the charisma, the specific projection of self that constitutes the stage persona. A good performance photograph from the front shows you everything the performer is offering to the audience in visual terms. What a performance photograph from the front does not always show is what the performance actually is.

The presentation of the performance is not the same as the performance. The face that knows it is being seen is not the same as the body that has forgotten it is being watched. The specific visual qualities of the back angle photograph are worth describing because they are the source of what makes the image different from the conventional performance shot.

The first thing you see when you look at it is the necklaces, the layered chains and pendants that she wore constantly that had become as much a part of her visual identity as the hair and the voice. Seen from behind, they catch the stage light in a way that the front angle does not allow.

The light comes from the stage lights in front of her. So from behind the necklaces are backlit visible as lightcatching objects in the dark shadow of her back. The second thing you see is the posture from the front. The posture of full commitment singing is legible but it is combined with the face and the expression and the direction of the performance toward the audience.

And these additional elements compete with the posture for your attention. From behind, there is nothing competing. The posture is everything in the frame, the slight forward lean, the way the shoulders have dropped, the position of the spine, the extension of the arm toward the microphone, the body fully organized around the act of production.

What the posture communicates without the face to complicate or clarify it is something that music writers reach for and rarely find the language for the complete physical occupation of the act of singing. Not singing as something the person is doing but singing as what the person currently is. The body has become the singing.

There is no remainder. No part of the posture says I am also thinking about something else. No part of the posture says I am aware of how this looks from the outside. The posture says only this is what is happening. The photographer who took the back angle image in 1968 was working in a club or a small venue.

The scale of the space and the scale of the image suggest an intimate setting rather than a large arena. The photograph was taken in the years when Janice Joplain was still a figure in the San Francisco scene rather than the fully national figure she would become after Mterrey or perhaps just after.

In the period when Mterrey had happened and the audience was expanding, but the shows were still happening in rooms of a certain size. He moved to the side and then to behind. He was working with the film cameras of the era, medium or long exposure times in the low light of a club venue. a 35 mm camera, the specific technical constraints that concert photography in 1968 involved.

He was not working from a position of certainty about what he was going to find from behind the stage. He was working from the instinct that something available from this angle was not available from the front. when he looked at what he had taken afterward, in the particular moment when a photographer examines contact sheets and the images resolve themselves into what they are rather than what the photographer expected them to be.

He saw something in the back angle image that he had not expected to see. Not the performance, not the stage presence, not the expression or the face or the projection toward the audience. The body completely occupied. The body with nothing held back. The body being what it was when no one was watching it be anything.

The question that the back angle photograph raises about what a portrait is and what it is supposed to show and whether showing the face is the same as showing the person is a question that extends beyond photography into the larger question of how artists are represented and what the representations capture and what they miss.

The public image of Janice Joplain that circulated in her lifetime and that has continued to circulate since her death is built almost entirely from front angle material, the performances, the press photographs, the television appearances, the concert footage. All of these show the version of herself that she presented to the world.

the singer, the performer, the stage presence, the face that was doing what the face does when it is fully committed to the act of performance. The back angle photograph shows something that this public image does not contain. Not a private self exactly because the context is still public performance, still a concert stage, but a view of the performance that the performer did not control and cannot manage, from an angle that the stage lights are not designed for, and that the audience cannot occupy. A view from outside the transaction between performer and audience from a place where neither the performance nor the audience is the subject and the only subject is the body in the act. This is the photograph that the photographer did not plan that found its

subject because the photographer moved because he walked around to the wrong side of the stage and found the right image there. The image circulated in limited ways in the years after it was taken. It was not the photograph that illustrated the standard profiles or the album reviews or the concert announcements.

Those were the front angle photographs, the face photographs, the images of Janice Joplain as the press and the music industry had learned to use her image. The back angle photograph did not serve the purposes for which photographs of performers are typically used because those purposes are usually about presenting the performer’s face and stage presence to a potential audience.

It found its audience gradually through the networks of people who care about concert photography as an art form and who have spent time in the archives looking at what photographers produced in that period. Beyond the images that were commercially useful, it has been shown in exhibition contexts, discussed in books about the visual culture of 1960s rock, used occasionally as an illustration in the kind of writing that is trying to say something specific about Janice Joplain that the conventional images do not support. The people who encounter it often have a response that is different from their response to the more famous photographs. The famous photographs are impressive and moving in the ways that great performance photography is impressive and moving. They show you the performance. The back angle image does something different. It shows you the person inside the performance,

not the person’s face, but the person’s body and the state that the person’s body is in when the performance is happening. And somehow without the face the person is more present. This is the paradox. The image shows less, it reveals more because the less it shows of what the performer controls, the more it shows of what the performer is.

Janice Joplain has been photographed more than most performers of her era. The record of images from her life between 1966 and 1970 is extensive, and the number of photographs that have circulated in the 50 years since her death is large. Most of what the culture knows about what she looked like comes from this visual record.

The face in performance, the face in interview, the face on television, the face that was for four years one of the most recognized faces in American popular music. The back angle photograph sits outside this record in a specific way. It is a record of the same performer in the same act at the same period of her career.

But it accesses something that the rest of the record does not access. The body without the face, the performance without the presentation, the singer without the ability to present the singing. And what it finds there is the thing that everyone who watched her sing was actually responding to without always being able to say what they were responding to.

Not the face, not the expression, the body’s complete occupation, the posture of total surrender to the act of production, the physical fact of a person who has in this moment nothing left in reserve because nothing was being held in reserve in the first place. The photograph shows no face. It shows everything else.

And everything else is what Janice Joplain was. All of it on stage every night with nothing between her and the song and nothing between the song and whoever was in the Oh my.