Rolling Stone’s Hottest Shots : Books: The counterculture’s favorite celebrity catalogue has just issued a photographic retrospective. And the images show rock ‘n’ roll’s evolution from raw to refined.

For a while, getting your picture on the cover of Rolling Stone was the new American dream. Now that the medium really is the message in our culture, it seems as many people dream of getting a photograph they shot on the cover as having their own mug appear there.

Like the rock ‘n’ roll it covers, Rolling Stone has been gathering mainstream respectability since Jann S. Wenner launched it as a 24-page, black-and-white newspaper in 1967, and celebrity photography has risen to glory in the magazine’s wake.

A new retrospective of Rolling Stone photographs--the $50 “Rolling Stone, the Photographs”--is as elegant and artsy a coffee table book as any appearing in an Architectural Digest spread.

The arrival of Rolling Stone into polite society reflects the triumph of the renegade culture that the magazine set out to portray. A few observers worry, however, that rock ‘n’ roll’s victory was won though a slickly contrived iconography that ignores deeper realities.

From the start, the aim of Rolling Stone’s photographers and photo editors has been as grandiose as the budding young stars they caught on film: “to document the rise of American youth culture, to capture the rock and roll spirit that spilled over into communes, festivals and politics. . . ,” publisher Wenner writes in his introduction to the book.

Tom Wolfe, a regular Rolling Stone contributor, speculates in his preface that 21st-Century historians will look at the photo collection with relish, as keys to the era in which “Americans developed the confidence--perhaps hubris is the word--to sweep aside standards and constraints that had been in place for millennia. . . .

“The last thing I want to do,” Wolfe adds, “is to lower the baggage of history upon these pictures. As you will see, they have their own special power to evoke our gaudy era. The confidence, the impudence, the pell-mell energy, the slightly mad freedom--it’s all there staring straight out.”

If nothing else, the book is guaranteed to click in the minds of baby boomers, triggering key memories of the way we were, or the way we thought we were, or the way a handful of photographers and art directors told us we were and tell us we are.

Click: Jimi Hendrix kneels before a flaming guitar at the Monterey Pop Festival, 1967.

Click: Honor guards roll up the red carpet as a helicopter carries Richard Nixon away, moments after he resigned as President.

Click: A naked John Lennon wraps himself around a fully clothed Yoko Ono, in a photograph that ran just after he was killed.

Click: Michael Jackson is a little kid with a big ‘fro.

Click: A demonic-looking Alice Cooper is coiled with a serpentine friend.

Click: George Harrison has decades of thought on his face and gray in his beard.

Click: Madonna. Click: Madonna. Click: Madonna.

Rolling Stone photographers generally agree that if they are propelled by any unifying force, it’s the freedom to develop their own style--a liberty extended by Laurie Kratochvil, the magazine’s photography editor for the past eight years.

That freedom led Albert Watson, for example, to snap close-ups of Mike Tyson’s head and neck, front and rear, conveying the boxer’s strength with unexpected directness. “I think you’re always looking for something that’s a little unusual,” Watson said. “You’re trying to get a shot that will be memorable in five years or 20 years. That will hold on.”

In another photograph, Watson and actor Jack Nicholson wandered into a blizzard outside the actor’s Aspen home. Watson asked the actor to have a seat on a lawn chair, but decided the shot would be better if some snow built up on Nicholson. “Nicholson said, ‘OK. But why don’t you go back into the house for 15 minutes.” Fifteen minutes later, Watson returned and got a peculiar, amusing shot of a cold, snow-dappled Nicholson.

This sort of control of the photograph and collaboration with the subject started with Annie Leibovitz, the photographer most closely associated with the Rolling Stone style. It has continued as a dominant force in the years since Leibovitz left the magazine.

” . . . Annie began to view the cover as a blank canvas with its own set of possibilities and problems,” Wenner writes in his introduction.

‘Photography by Committee’

Not all viewers are entirely impressed with where this sort of photographic styling has taken the magazine, though. For Robert Hilburn, the Los Angeles Times’ rock critic, the Rolling Stone book suggests a trend that approaches “photography by committee. It’s as if some of these are done as album jackets or book covers, rather than--in the corniest sense--to seek the soul of the artist,” he said.

Baron Wolman, who was Rolling Stone’s first staff photographer and is represented by several shots in the book, laments that the directness of earlier photographs has fallen out of style at the magazine.

“I’m not making a judgment. I think it’s interesting what they’re doing now,” he said. “It’s just not how I shoot.” As an example, he points to a candid shot of blues star B. B. King from the book. “That picture of B. B. King captured a moment. That was B. B. King being himself, not B. B. King posing for me or doing something strange to make a curious image. It was just a backstage moment.”

Photographs of candid backstage moments are almost extinct in Rolling Stone and most other publications now, said Jim Marshall, who is represented in the book by an early shot of Bob Dylan and a picture of Janis Joplin slumped in a dressing room with a bottle Southern Comfort.

Such impromptu exposures vanished when artists and their managers began demanding more control of the image-making process and photographers and their editors began accepting it, some photographers say. Some bands don’t allow photographers into their concerts at all; others orchestrate their movements as if they were part of the act.

“The stakes are much higher now, and with that kind of money at stake, everybody is very edgy about everything,” Marshall said. So, it’s no wonder that recent high-profile rock packages have shown “nothing of the gritty end of the business. No stuff from hotel rooms. Nothing like that. Now we’re seeing only what the artists and their managers want us to see. I think we are the lesser for it.”

E. J. Camp, a regular Rolling Stone contributor who has seven photographs in the book, including a moody black-and-white nude of rocker Billy Idol, readily admits that “I always feel obliged to a subject to make them look good.”

But she doesn’t see that compromising the integrity of the photograph.

By the time she completes a shoot, she has developed empathy for the person she eyes through her viewfinder: “I don’t want to make the look vulgar or gritty. I want to show their nice qualities.

“I think you should always be digging out some essence of the character in the shot,” and through an intense interaction with her subject, she evokes a more honest portrayal, she believes.

“There are many ways to arrive at insight,” said Matthew Rolston, who contributed some of the most unusual images in the book, including a portrait of Madonna in a circus setting, a fiercely erotic nude of actress Lisa Bonet and a portrait of George Michael’s face within an outline of his hand.

“I think the picture of George Michael with the hand has insight, but it gets there in different way than the picture of Jimi Hendrix with the flaming guitar does,” he said. “With the earliest pictures, reportage was the dominant style. Now manipulation and stylization are more today. . . . I like reportage too. Both are great approaches. . . . But I’m as much a child of my time as they were of theirs. There is a war between Realism and Expressionism now, and we’re living in Expressionist period.”

Wenner agrees with this art-reflects-the-times assessment. The sort of warts-and-all shots of carousing Rolling Stones that Rolling Stone used to run no longer are accurate, he said. Even now, when the magazine portrays a group such as the new heavy-metal heroes Guns N’ Roses, their hard living shows: “It’s hard to hide it, it’s on their faces.”

But today’s Stones are more indicative of the epoch, and photographs of the band reflect that. “The drunken revelry isn’t there,” Wenner said. “It’s a very professional tour, with hair dressers, makeup artists. They don’t drink anymore, they exercise like mad, and they are all very concerned with their appearances.”