The Rolling Stones. 45th Ed.

Nearly everyone who has ever picked up a camera has, at some point, wanted the Rolling Stones on the other side of it. Six decades of that wanting is the problem this tribute has to solve. How do you assemble a visual history of the most photographed band in rock without the whole enterprise sliding into a gift-shop souvenir?

TASCHEN's answer, put together by editor Reuel Golden and shrunk down here from a far larger collector's edition, is scale and range. The pages draw on dozens of photographers across the entire run of the band, from grimy early-sixties club nights to stadiums the size of small towns. There are club portraits, tour candids, stadium spectacles, contact sheets, magazine covers, unguarded backstage lulls. The sheer spread is the argument, and for a good while it is a persuasive one.

For a photographer the real pleasure is comparative. Watching David Bailey, Anton Corbijn, and a long line of others each take a run at the same five faces is a working seminar in how framing manufactures meaning. The young band is shot like a threat to public order. The middle years are all swagger and smoke and unbuttoned shirts. The late stadium era turns the same men into monuments viewed from a reverent distance. The faces barely change across the decades; the way the camera is aimed at them changes everything, and that slow drift is the actual subject of the collection, whether or not it means to be. A studious eye can practically date each image by the grammar of the pose alone, from wary and hungry to imperial and remote.

Put an early Bailey portrait next to a stadium-era frame and the whole story sits there in two pictures. Bailey gives you five sharp young men crowded into a tight rectangle, dangerous and bored in equal measure, shot close enough to smell the cigarettes. Forty years on, the same faces float across a jumbotron-scaled spread, tiny against a wall of light, gods glimpsed from the back of an arena. Nobody planned that arc as a single body of work, yet the collection lets you read it as one.

The band is almost incidental to that lesson.

What the collection does not do is teach you much about making a single great picture. It is curated for devotion, not for instruction, and depth is the price paid for the sweep. Individual images arrive with little context, captions do work that argument might have done, and the sheer volume tends to flatten strong frames and weak ones into one continuous glossy stream. Nothing is examined long enough to harden into a lesson. It is a monument to a myth far more than it is a study of a craft. You leaf, you admire, you move on, and very little of it lodges as something you could carry back to a shoot.

Which returns to all those people who ever wanted the band in front of a lens. The quiet revelation stacked across these pages is that the Stones wanted it just as badly, and learned to perform for the camera as precisely as they performed on a stage. The myth was co-written by everyone holding a shutter. Read that way, the souvenir problem stops being a defect and becomes the whole point. This is what sixty years of mutual mythmaking looks like when you pile it all into one place.