Paul McCartney’s Fab Photos Show at Brooklyn Museum

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Musicians who make visual art are not uncommon. David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, and Sharon Stone have all painted, while Lenny Kravitz, Michael Stipe, and Patti Smith were serious photographers.

But rarely does an amateur blend raw talent, a knack for gleaning insights from professionals, and insider access to capture historically significant moments like those featured in Paul McCartney’s Photographs 1963–1964: Eyes of the Storm, which first showed at the National Portrait Gallery in London and is on view at the Brooklyn Museum in New York from 3 May to 18 August.

Shot at the height of Beatlemania, the selection of over 250 largely black and white photos offers a rare glimpse into the private lives of four young men on the cusp of changing the world. More than mere snapshots taken in the right place at the right time, they are thoughtfully composed works that just happen to feature moments critical to the evolution of 20th Century art and culture.

‘Everywhere I went, I just took pictures,’ McCartney shared with the National Portrait Gallery. But Catherine Futter, director of curatorial affairs at the Brooklyn Museum, said Sir Paul took the art of photography much more seriously than that, having learned from the many professional photographers he encountered during the Beatles’ rise.

‘They had the press photographers as well as photographers taking album covers and he was learning from them... He’s blending the two: he has the access, but he’s also making a very composed shot,’ Futter told Ocula.

More than a voyeuristic glimpse at a tumultuous year, they’re also a portrait of four young men whose lives were upended by their success, precisely at the moment their reality shifted irrevocably.

From the image of an awkward Ringo setting up his drum kit for the Beatles’ debut on the Ed Sullivan Show to the throngs of adoring fans held back by police and barricades in front of the Plaza Hotel, this trove of photos, recently rediscovered by McCartney, ranges from intimate and introspective to something approaching photojournalism.

McCartney captures a pensive John Lennon in the back of a cab wearing heavy black-framed glasses and the ‘mop top’ that would define the group’s early look, holding a loosely closed fist to his mouth and gazing deeply into the lens of McCartney’s Pentax film camera. It’s a prescient preview of the poet who was just then emerging.

In a later Kodachrome taken in Miami Beach, we see a shirtless George Harrison accept a cocktail from a woman in a bright yellow tankini. The shot seems to captures the young man accepting the mantle of superstardom, perhaps for the first time.

Another image suggests this process of becoming wasn’t straightforward or linear. A candid shot captured in Paris shows an embarrassed Ringo Starr wearing a ridiculous hat for a staged photo shoot, forlorn as a puppy forced into a costume. —[O]

Main image: Paul McCartney, George Harrison. Miami Beach (1964). Chromogenic print. © 1964 PaulMcCartney under exclusive license to MPL Archive LLP.