Dee Lippingwell.Bag Boy Photo/Supplied
On Sept. 27, 1981, at Rich Stadium in Buffalo, N.Y., rock photographer Dee Lippingwell took a blow to get her shot. She had been assigned to photograph the Rolling Stones, but all press photo opportunities were revoked because of bad weather. Without that media-only access, Ms. Lippingwell was just one of the reported 75,000 people packed sardine-tight in the crowd, albeit with Nikon in hand.
The diminutive mother of two pressed her way through the rowdy throng but found herself at a poor vantage. “The stage was too high and I wasn’t back far enough, so each time Mick Jagger came to our side of the stage – always running! – the fanatics in front of me would go into a frenzy, waving to grab Mick’s attention but blocking my shot,” Ms. Lippingwell said in 2006.
Good luck came in the form of a burly biker who hoisted her on his shoulders for an unobstructed and unchallenged view. When she returned to her seat, though, she was hurting. Earlier, when she had raised her camera as the crowd surged, no one would have heard the snapping. “Fighting the thousands of screaming fans gave me two cracked ribs,” she reminisced, “but the pain was well worth the shot.”
Ms. Lippingwell, who would recover to shoot the Stones a half dozen more times over a long, storied career, died of cancer on May 9, at Laurel Place Care Centre, in Surrey, B.C. She was 78.
She was a self-taught shooter who began her career in Vancouver in the 1970s, a classic-rock golden age full of photogenic musicians and music magazines with pages to fill. Her portfolio bulges with concert shots of music gods and goddesses such as Bruce Springsteen, Heart, Prince, Rush, Sting, the Who, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, Celine Dion, David Bowie, Cher, Iggy Pop, Aerosmith and, in the early 1980s, a breakout Canadian artist.
“I loved Dee, and always enjoyed meeting her,” singer-songwriter and fellow photographer Bryan Adams told The Globe and Mail. “She was such a big part of the Vancouver music scene.”
For her part, Ms. Lippingwell said the Cuts Like a Knife singer was problematic to shoot on stage: “He doesn’t like having his picture taken, I guess.”
That much is true, according to Mr. Adams. “I never enjoyed being photographed in the early years. I thought I looked like a toad.”
Working often for The Georgia Straight and The Music Express, Ms. Lippingwell shot Queen from the rafters of the Pacific Coliseum, shared snacks and Champagne with Long John Baldry in Bette Midler’s dressing room and helped break the fall of Alice Cooper when the shock rocker infamously toppled off the stage in Vancouver in 1975.
“Dee just had this ability to push herself into extraordinary situations,” said Kaeli Yarwood,, owner of Steffich Fine Art, on Salt Spring Island, B.C. “She was a magnetic person who had the personality to withstand an often difficult environment.”
Randy Bachman with BTO, Sept 1976.Dee Lippingwell Archive/Courtesy of National Music Centre
Ms. Lippingwell tended to work in black and white, mostly among men in the photographer pit in front of the stages. Misogyny and territorialism were rampant, especially in the heady, hedonistic Seventies.
“When I started, it was really difficult for me to get in because everybody thought I was a groupie,” she told the Surrey Now-Leader in 2012. “I kept saying, ‘No, I’m a mom and I want to do this for my career.’”
A medical receptionist by trade, Ms. Lippingwell made her first foray into music photography at a Pink Floyd show at Vancouver’s PNE Garden Auditorium on Sept. 30, 1972. She was just a concertgoer with her first 35mm camera and a borrowed long-range lens. “I knew nothing about stage lighting or the correct film speed or shutter speed to use,” she recalled in 2012′s First Three Songs…No Flash!, one of her three books of photos. “I was flying by the seat of my pants.” (The book title, First Three Songs…No Flash!, refers to the restrictions typically imposed upon accredited concert photographers who are allowed to shoot during the first three songs only, with no extra lighting employed.)
Picking up the pictures days later at a Shoppers Drug Mart photo lob, she noticed gold stars on the envelope. The sales clerk at the counter explained the glittery designation was a compliment. Later, Ms. Lippingwell walked into a local record store that had a photo display of the Pink Floyd concert in its front window. Ms. Lippingwell showed her superior shots to the store owner, who immediately put the novice photographer’s work on display instead.
“From that day onward I took my camera to every concert that I attended,” she said. “At first using colour film, but I quickly discovered that I couldn’t afford to take colour.”
Ms. Lippingwell appeared to catch her first major break in the business in 1975 when the editor of the Vancouver weekly newspaper The Georgia Straight took an interest in her work. Before he could hire her, however, the editor rushed to his native Ireland because of work visa issues. He was Bob Geldof, who would form the Boomtown Rats and score a career-making hit with I Don’t Like Mondays in 1979.
That year, Mr. Geldof toured North America with his band and returned to Vancouver to play the city’s Commodore Ballroom, where he noticed a familiar female photographer. “He saw me in the crowd and mouthed, ‘Ah, you got the job.’”
Initially, she kept her hospital job while moonlighting in concert halls for The Georgia Straight and other publications, and also taking commercial work. “I know that shooting a picture of a running shoe isn’t as exciting as a rock star, but nine times out of 10 the running-shoe picture pays the rent,” she said in a Globe and Mail article.
Jann Arden, 1995.Dee Lippingwell Archive/Courtesy of National Music Centre
A full-time photographer beginning in 1980, Ms. Lippingwell was respected for her trailblazing work in a male-dominated profession.
“I guess I wanted to prove these guys wrong, and I did. I’ve heard from several other female photographers that I was the one that paved the way for them to get into the business, and it makes me feel really good inside. The first time I heard that I almost cried.”
Ms. Lippingwell was born Doreen Grace Baerg on Oct. 12, 1945, in Vancouver. Her parents were Hazel Baerg (née Goodall) from Wales and Cornelius Baerg from Russia. She spent much of her childhood in Trail, B.C. Her first camera was a Kodak Brownie she won when her earliest work was entered in a photo contest by her grandfather.
According to First Three Songs…No Flash!, she lived with her parents and three siblings in a one-room open-concept space behind her mother’s flower shop. Later they graduated to a one-bedroom apartment with a bathroom shared with a “fat guy next door who always used all the hot water, so we had to bathe in cold water.” While in her teens, she married David Lippingwell and they started a family.
Her first pop music experience happened on Aug. 22, 1964, when the Beatles played Vancouver’s Empire Stadium. Escorted by police motorcycles into the city from the airport, the Beatles encountered a crowd of fans on Oak Street. A black limousine stopped right in front of Ms. Lippingwell and her stroller-bound nine-month-old child, Chris. The window rolled down.
“Chris leaned forward with his little hands outstretched and all these hands from within the limo start shaking his,” Ms. Lippingwell recalled. “I caught the glimpse of Paul McCartney’s grin, Ringo’s hair and John’s teeth with shouts of “Hello, hello” and then, as quickly as it had stopped, the entourage started moving once again up Oak Street. I was stunned – the Beatles had touched my son!”
Dee Lippingwell photos on exhibit in the Canadian Music Hall of Fame gallery at Studio Bell, home of the National Music Centre. Dee Lippingwell recently donated her entire catalogue of black and white negatives to National Music Centre.National Music Centre
For a self-described “rock chick,” Ms. Lippingwell’s interest in popular music was late to bloom: She purchased her first stereo – a smoky plastic and metal model costing $159 – in her early 20s. The salesman threw in Frank Sinatra’s 1969 LP, My Way. Later, her brother’s copy of the 1970 Pink Floyd album Atom Heart Mother was a revelation.
“Saving for and buying that stereo was life-changing,” she recalled.
Ms. Lippingwell had no formal training in photography whatsoever. She was initially a hobbyist with a good eye and the instructional Time-Life collection of books, Life Library of Photography. “They were a godsend,” she said in 2021. “Each volume dealt with different aspects of film, processing and black-and-white printing.”
In the early 1990s, she began shooting country artists. In 2011, she was inducted into the BC Country Music Association’s Hall of Fame for her work in preserving the province’s country music history. For 17 years she shot such stars as Johnny Cash, Reba McEntire and Keith Urban as the staff photographer for the Merritt Mountain Music Festival. Her time with the festival is represented in her 2021 book, Memories from the Mountain.
According to the owner of the gallery which represents her, Ms. Lippingwell’s top-selling prints are of Tina Turner. “There’s one, a cropped sideview, that gives me chills just looking at it,” Ms. Yarwood said. “Dee just got these moments of pure talent in her own way. These are pieces of history and extraordinary views of a time that many of us look back on fondly.”
Ms. Lippingwell recently donated tens of thousands of black-and-white negatives to the National Music Centre in Calgary, where her images are currently on display in the Canadian Music Hall of Fame gallery.
One of her favourite subjects was Rod Stewart. When she published a rock ‘n’ roll calendar in 1978 that featured a poignant shot of the Hot Legs star from a year earlier, she ran into possible copyright issues. According to Ms. Lippingwell, Mr. Stewart intervened. “He said he loved the photo and ordered a box of 100 calendars for friends, family and crew.”
Rush, 1979.Dee Lippingwell Archive/Courtesy of National Music Centre
Ms. Lippingwell recently said that another photo of Mr. Stewart, from the Pacific Coliseum in 1989, was her all-time favourite. The rocker is captured on stage with his arms outstretched in a pose of generous, wide-open presentation which the photographer identified with.
“‘Here I am,’ he’s saying. And that’s what I say.”
She leaves her husband, Paul Shaw; sons, Marc Lippingwell and Chris Lippingwell; brother, David Baerg; and grandchildren, Shauna Lippingwell and Tyler Lippingwell.
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