This rare 20” x 16” oversized silver gelatin photograph offers an unusually vulnerable and intimate portrait of Mick Jagger, frozen in a moment of near-stillness amid the chaos of the Rolling Stones’ 1972 Madison Square Garden performance.

His face, drenched in sweat, is captured with unflinching realism—eyes wide, lips parted, mouth slightly agape as if between breaths or thoughts. Unlike the explosive motion seen in most Jagger stage imagery, this haunting image reveals the fragile human behind the myth—a flash of exhaustion, reflection, or revelation caught mid-tour in the glare of the stage lights.

Marked by film edges and visible development fluid marks, the photograph reads like an artifact retrieved directly from the photographer’s darkroom, evoking the raw immediacy of Peter Beard’s process. It’s not just an image—it’s a psychological x-ray of a cultural icon at his most physically and emotionally exposed.

This photograph comes from the TERRY SOUTHERN COLLECTION, taken by Peter Beard, the wild-eyed photographer who, along with Truman Capote, rode the Stones’ 1972 U.S. Tour on assignment for Rolling Stone. Southern, covering the same tour for Saturday Review, was embedded in the creative chaos—both backstage and on the road. In 1975, Beard and Southern would reunite to write a screenplay based on Beard’s seminal wildlife book The End of the Game, deepening their shared artistic legacy. This photograph stands as a relic of that intense creative triangle: Beard behind the lens, Southern writing the scene, Jagger commanding the stage.

This photograph is a rare and emotional counterpoint to the typical wild energy of Jagger’s stage persona—capturing not the roar, but the breath between. For collectors of rock history, cultural counterpoints, or psychological portraiture, it is a uniquely compelling moment of stillness amid the storm.