Review: A feral, mischievous, ecstatic Bowie revealed in new Seattle MoPOP photo exhibit

The contrast is hilarious.

At the table sit two young gents who are the final word in flamboyant haberdashery.

In front of them sit the humble offerings of British Rail cuisine: tinned peas, boiled potatoes and some kind of mystery meat.

The gents are David Bowie and guitarist Mick Ronson. The year is 1972. And in the flush of Bowie’s breakthrough success with “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,” the two are headed by train (Bowie had a fear of flying) from London to Scotland for a performance. Out the window, a pastoral landscape rolls by. Inside the train, a foppish, gender-bending revolution is brewing.

This cheekily jubilant two-shot of Bowie and Ronson is one of the highlights of “David Bowie: Starman, Shot by Mick Rock.” But it has plenty of glorious company.

Most of the 65 photographs in the show date from a 21-month period (1972-1973) when photographer Mick Rock (his real name) was riding aboard the Bowie juggernaut. He had complete access to Bowie & Co., and he made eclectic use of it. He catches Bowie at home, in transit, backstage and in hotel rooms. He photographs him eating, sleeping and canoodling with Lou Reed and Mick Jagger.

Bowie looks alternatively mischievous, feral, haunted and ecstatic. He isn’t quite carnal enough to be straightforwardly “sexy” — but he is suggestively slithery. His clothes are amazing; his makeup out-of-this-world. To call him “photogenic” is like calling Beethoven’s Ninth a pretty good symphony.

Photographs don’t take themselves, of course, and Bowie had a perfect collaborator in Rock, whose images — evenly divided between color and black-and-white — range from spontaneous concert shots to carefully staged poses.

Rock’s compositional eye can be striking. A 1972 portrait of Bowie, caught in a mirror reflection as he gazes out at the garden of his South London home, has an almost Pre-Raphaelite air about it. While leading a tour through the exhibit last week, Rock remembered it as one of the photos that prompted Bowie to remark, “Mick sees me the way I see myself.”

Other bold photographs include a tightly cropped headshot in which the dominating feature is one long, Bowie eyelash. A concert shot of Bowie seen through Ronson’s legs is zany fun, too.

A still from Rock’s music video for “Life on Mars?” looks more like a Hockney painting than something caught on film. It makes clear that all Rock and Bowie needed were a blank, white backdrop, a suit by Freddie Burretti and makeup by Pierre Laroche to create something visionary.

Rock shot four videos for Bowie altogether — “John, I’m Only Dancing,” “Space Oddity” and “The Jean Genie” are the others — and they’re all on display in the exhibit, prefaced by commentaries from Rock. Each was a hastily shot, low-budget affair. “I think sometimes,” Rock says in his preface to “Life on Mars,” “that the lack of a budget and money and the urgency of youth helped a bit.”

A small selection of non-Bowie photographs — a gorgeous shot of a sad and soulful Syd Barrett, the iconic image Lou Reed used for his “Transformer” album cover — make a dandy coda to the show.