Mary McCartney: From Where I Stand
From Where I Stand, published in 2010, is Mary McCartney's first book. It gathers roughly 160 photographs from fifteen years behind the camera: portraits, backstage pictures, and quieter domestic images that read as observation rather than assignment work.
The book pairs family pictures, Paul and Linda McCartney among them, with portraits of Madonna, Bono, Debbie Harry, Elvis Costello, Dennis Hopper, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kate Moss, alongside subjects from rockabilly culture and the Royal Ballet, an earlier body of work she had exhibited separately. McCartney's method favors proximity over formality: she has described waiting for a subject to let the camera in rather than directing a shot. Peter Blake, the pop artist behind the Sgt. Pepper's cover, supplies an introduction, and Chrissie Hynde a foreword. The book accompanied an exhibition of the same name at London's National Portrait Gallery, which then toured to the United States, Germany, and Sweden.
McCartney began assisting her mother, the photographer Linda McCartney, before turning professional in 1995. Her first solo exhibition, Off Pointe, documented the Royal Ballet's Corps de Ballet in 2004. From Where I Stand consolidated a decade and a half of that independent practice into her first monograph, and she has continued publishing photography books alongside a parallel career as a documentary filmmaker.
