The Photographs

The portraits in this special issue form a historic gallery of the best music you will ever see. Rock & roll has always been a revolution of sound and vision, and these images -- most of which first appeared on the pages and covers of Rolling Stone -- are a visual account of rock's first fifty years, in extreme close-up.

These photographs, selected by the editors of Rolling Stone, also give you the souls inside the music. They are moments that speak volumes about living in and for rock & roll. You feel the heat of transformation, too, that moment when greatness begets fame and the rebel next door becomes the idol of millions. These are not just pictures of rock's biggest stars. They are the shots that made them stars -- and legends.

Rock & roll portraiture, like rock & roll itself, begins with Elvis Presley. Jay Leviton's magnetic portrayal here of the 1956 Presley -- shirtless, in bed, already a king in everything but crown -- packs into a single shot the sexual force and primal confidence with which Presley conquered America and the world. By the mid-1960s, Jimi Hendrix and the Doors' Jim Morrison were treating studio portraits as an extension of their records and live performances, addressing the cameras of Gered Mankowitz and Joel Brodsky with the same attention to style, creative liberty and emotional honesty.

But photography is a team art, and The Photographs is a tribute to the artists on the other side of the lens as well, particularly Rolling Stone chief photographers Annie Leibovitz and Mark Seliger. Leibovitz was a twenty-year-old student at the San Francisco Art Institute when she joined the magazine in 1970. But she quickly invented contemporary celebrity photography, combining rock & roll energy and provocative settings with journalistic realism in now-immortal Rolling Stone covers of Brian Wilson, Pete Townshend, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono. In the 1990s, Seliger documented the mutinous spirit of rap and hard rock in defining images of Ice-T and Metallica's James Hetfield, while celebrating classic artists such as Neil Young and the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia.

The Photographs is a collection of portraits; there are no concert photos here. But these are not still-lifes. This is what rock & roll looks like, up close, in the flesh. Feast your eyes.

John and Yoko by Annie Leibovitz

Kurt Cobain by Mark Seliger

Lil' Kim by David LaChapelle

James Hetfield by Mark Seliger

Neil Young by Mark Seliger

Eminem by David LaChapelle

Britney Spears by David LaChapelle

Pete Townshend by Annie Leibovitz

U2 by Anton Corbijn

Marilyn Manson by Matt Mahurin

Janet Jackson by Patrick Demarchelier

Red Hot Chili Peppers by Mark Seliger