![]() Closer to their age, Freeman looked like he belonged in their gang.Īfter McCartney’s films were developed, he marked up his favourite shots on contact sheets with a chinagraph pencil, as he’d watched the pros do. Robert Freeman was another he had recently been hired by Brian Epstein, the band’s manager, to take the striking chiaroscuro shot, influenced by French new wave cinema, for the cover of With the Beatles, their second album. Dezo Hoffmann, a Czech émigré who had flown with the RAF in the second world war and now worked for Record Mirror, was one he had travelled to Liverpool to photograph the Beatles in 1962 and stayed close. As true today as it was back then’įrom the ever-present professionals, he could solicit advice. Ringo Starr on a flight to Miami: ‘Following our US trip, Ringo coined the phrase “Tomorrow never knows”. Small enough to carry with him on tour, it enabled him to capture moments offstage with his bandmates and their entourage. In 1963, as Beatlemania swept Britain, and perhaps partly in retaliation against now being constantly confronted by the lenses of newspaper and magazine photographers, McCartney acquired a 35mm Pentax. (His younger brother has also worked as a photographer, and Mike McCartney’s wonderful study of Paul and John Lennon playing acoustic guitars together, heads down as they work on a song, is part of this exhibition.) But Paul fondly remembers, as many of his contemporaries would, the experience of loading his parents’ primitive “Kodak box Brownie” with a roll of film good for only eight exposures, generally considered quite enough to record an entire postwar family holiday. McCartney wasn’t a photographer, although later he would marry one, and later still a daughter of that marriage would become one. As the Beatles travel on to snow-covered Washington DC and sun-kissed Miami Beach, I Want to Hold Your Hand is topping the US charts and the British invasion has begun. ![]() Within days they are in New York, appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show and conquering the hearts of a nation whose teenagers have, until this moment, been content to worship home-grown idols. I often took her portrait while we were together’ ![]() Jane Asher: ‘I moved in with Jane Asher at the end of the year. Then, early in the new year, come 18 sold-out days and nights at the venerable Olympia music hall in Paris, playing two and sometimes three shows a day to a new generation of yé-yé fans at the top of a bill including acrobats and comedians. ![]() The sequence of 250 backstage and off-duty images begins at the Liverpool Empire, a triumphant return home for the group during a UK tour reaching its climax at Finsbury Park Astoria in north London, where their 16-night Christmas variety show also features the actor Dora Bryan, recently in the charts with All I Want for Christmas Is a Beatle. Whatever their merits as art, McCartney’s hitherto unseen photos, taken between December 1963 and February 1964, record a pivotal moment in popular culture. Eyes of the Storm, the exhibition of Paul McCartney’s photographs at London’s newly reopened National Portrait Gallery, depicts with great clarity and special intimacy the handful of weeks in which the Beatles were transformed from a local celebration into a global phenomenon. Then, suddenly, they belonged to the world. First they were ours, for a brief and precious moment.
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