Intimate photographs of Paul McCartney on display

As Beatlemania spread across the world in the early 1960s, Beatles They found themselves in a whirlwind of camera flashes and suddenly their faces were everywhere. So far, however, we have relatively little idea of what the experience was like from their perspective. For the first time, Paul McCartney shows the public more than 250 photographs he took between November 1963 and February 1964, in an exhibition that inaugurated the temporary exhibition galleries of the recently renovated National Portrait Gallery, in London.

Most of the photographs are of McCartney himself or of his bandmates John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, and were taken at the time the Beatles achieved fame in the United States. In one series, they are shown rehearsing for a major TV appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, which had an audience of 73 million. In the same month, frantic fans are caught chasing the group's car on West 58th Street in New York and McCartney also recorded a series of personal memories of a beach vacation in Miami.

"Looking at these photographs now, decades after they were taken, I think there is a kind of innocence to them," McCartney said in a press release. “Everything was new for us at that moment. But I like to think I wouldn't accept them any differently today. They now bring back so many stories, a flood of special memories, which is one of the many reasons I love them all and know they will always spark my imagination.”

Many of the photographs were recently printed for the first time, having been left as negatives in McCartney's personal archive and only rediscovered by the musician in 2020. Presented alongside McCartney's own reflections, they offer a new behind-the-scenes lens on the famous story of how four Young Liverpudlians have become global superstars and redefined the meaning of celebrity for the modern era.

Source: Artnet News