Beatles or the Stones? Choose both

Beatles or Stones? If you truly loved pop music in the 1960s - I mean as a naïvely unironic consumer, which was and is the only way truly to love it - there was no ducking the choice and no cop-out third option, no Partick Thistle of pop. You could dance with them both, but there was never any doubt which one you’d take home.

With the Fabs in permanent retirement and the Stones long self-reduced to a high-camp pantomime travesty of a rock band, that gulf today takes on the proportions of a puddle, a bucket of slops in the fetid ocean of Dad Rock. But for those of us who see the 1960s as culturally more interesting than as a source of programming for oldies’ radio stations, viewing the exhibition The Rolling Stones and the Beatles feels like the sudden throwing of a dusty old switch to release electricity long thought disconnected.

Gered Mankowitz was the Stones’ "official unofficial" photographer between 1965 and 1967, covering their 1965 US tour and creating several distinctive, arrogantly aloof LP sleeves including Between the Buttons, Out of Our Heads and Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass). Paul Saltzman was an American hippie getting his head and broken heart together at the Maharishi’s holiday camp at Rishikesh, where he took snaps of the Beatles and friends, who just happened to be there in the same week of 1968.

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Is a certain dichotomy, perhaps fortuitously, beginning to emerge here?

Mankowitz became part of the Stones circle in 1964 by taking pictures of the very young Marianne Faithfull for her "dangerously cool" manager and London scene-shaker Andrew Loog Oldham, who also managed the Stones. Oldham was a "difficult, in-your-face" - says Mankowitz, with a certain note of euphemism - showbiz Svengali of 20 who found Mankowitz’s professional and personal style simpatico to the creation of his monsters of outrage. The Beatles were playing mystics at Rishikesh partly to get over the sudden death of their own manager, Brian Epstein, a polite, fatherly Liverpool businessman.

Taking a cue from 1960s pop writer Nik Cohn, Mankowitz says: "The difference in image between the Beatles and the Stones [in the mid-1960s] was that the Beatles looked like they wanted to hold your hand, while the Stones looked like they wanted to ravish your sister." It’s a highly coloured and simplified trope, but it does capture quite well, in an exaggerated way, what made each group in its separate way so different, so appealing.

In his studio as much as in his stage/backstage pictures of the Stones, there’s a verite feel at work, a rawness and even an indifference on the part of his subjects that contrasts strongly with the Beatles’ desire - even as late as their last 1970 photo-shoot - to be liked. It’s a contrast that sharply anatomises the two paths, dark and light, of what we think of now as 1960s culture. In the casual stroppiness of the group shot, taken on Primrose Hill for the cover of Between the Buttons, the Stones could be a street gang, haunting the common for no good intent in the early hours of daylight. But at Rishikesh, all is sweetness and light, the brightly coloured pictures shimmering in a miasma of zoned-out peace and love that, given the lowly status of their photographer, is probably entirely sincere, or at least unconscious. When the Beatles told us they loved us, it was with a straight face; but on the Stones’ foray into psychedelia on the song We Love You, it was with a stoned sneer.

By chance, Mankowitz left the Stones’ entourage - as a consequence of his friend and original patron Oldham’s sacking as their manager - before that side of the 1960s grew really dark. The chaos and death at the free concert at the Altamont Speedway were yet to be enacted, ditto the kaleidoscope of psychosexual madness and dubious company that revolved around the 1968 film Performance. Although it is with a wince, even now, that he describes the parting of the ways as "a bit brutal ... but that was the ways things had to be" - he could almost be a minor 1960s tearaway apologising for Ron and Reggie Kray’s management techniques.

Mankowitz was there, and glad to be there, and appreciated it even at the time, but he doesn’t have any regret that he wasn’t around that part of the 1960s much longer. He got off the Magic Bus at the right time. For Paul Saltzman, still an unregenerate old hippie (and I mean that in the nicest possible way), that week in Rishikesh never went away. Whose pictures do you think are the more interesting? And which photographer do you think was the luckier?

• The Rolling Stones By Gered Mankowitz and The Beatles In India By Paul Saltzman, presented by Street Level Photoworks in association HP and Proud Galleries London, open today at Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, until 20 March.