TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — The University of Arizona announced Thursday that its Center for Creative Photography will host the North American premiere of a “Linda McCartney Retrospective” next year, celebrating her 30-year career as a photographer.
The exhibition will run from February 24 to August 5 and will be free for visitors, the school said. They added that the retrospective of McCartney’s career will also highlight her many connections to Tucson, where she died in 1998 of breast cancer at the age of 56.
McCartney took up photography as a hobby while studying at the University of Arizona in the early 1960s, and many of her early photographs feature the Sonoran Desert in Tucson as a backdrop.
She and her famous musician husband bought a 151-acre (61-hectare) ranch in northeast Tucson in 1979, ten years after marrying in London.
“Linda carried her camera around most of the time, capturing images in an instinctive way that made her subjects feel completely comfortable in the process,” Paul McCartney said in a statement. “She loved to explore and found ways to make her art joyful and innovative at the same time.”
University officials said the exhibition will include about 200 works divided into three broad groups.
One group, titled Artists, will include a wide range of Linda McCartney’s portraits of cultural and musical icons, including The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin and Eric Clapton.
Another group, ‘Family’, will feature images documenting her view of domestic life after moving to England with her family, while ‘Photographic Research’ will showcase McCartney’s experimentation with photographic processes, including never before Unexhibited screen prints and wall Polaroid prints.
