By Lucie Young
They are now a collector’s trove — Paul McCartney’s own photos, shot 60 years ago, when the Beatles took Europe and America by storm: images of screaming fans (one carrying a live monkey); a girl in a yellow bikini; airport workers playing air guitar; and unguarded moments grabbed from trains, planes and automobiles.
McCartney, now 81, doesn’t like to sit still and reminisce about the past, so he chatted while driving home from his recording studio in Sussex, England. “My American friends call these small, one-way lanes ‘gun barrels,’” he said, warning his interviewer that at any moment the signal might die (it did). It took two days to complete a coherent conversation about the breakthrough period when the Beatles went viral, captured in the traveling exhibition “Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-1964: Eyes of the Storm,” which features 250 of his shots. It is currently at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, and comes to the Brooklyn Museum in New York from May 3 to Aug. 18. (Don’t be surprised if the artist shows up for the opening.)
It was McCartney’s archivist, Sarah Brown, who found 1,000 photographs the musician had taken over 12 weeks — from Dec. 7, 1963, to Feb. 21, 1964 — in the artist’s library.
“I thought the photos were lost,” McCartney said. “In the ’60s it was pretty easy. Often doors were left open. We’d invite fans in.” Even the recording studio wasn’t a safe space. “I was taking my daughter Mary to the British Library to show her where to research for her exams, and in one display case I saw the lyric sheet for ‘Yesterday,’” he said. A sticky-fingered biographer had swiped the original from their studio.
Rosie Broadley, a senior curator at the National Portrait Gallery in London, where the show was inaugurated, said, “His photographs show us what it was like to look through his eyes while the Beatles conquered the world.”
McCartney won an art prize at school and practiced photography with his brother, Mike (who later became a professional photographer). He graduated to a 35 mm SLR Pentax camera when the Beatles hit it big.
“It was the most sophisticated hand-held camera of the era; it would be like having the latest iPhone today,” Darius Himes, Christie’s international head of photography, said, adding: “We were all quite surprised by Paul’s sophisticated eye and his awareness of trends in the visual arts. The yellow bikini shot is like a striking mix of Stephen Shore, William Eggleston and William Klein.”
The Beatles traveled with a flock of cameramen and were not shy about gleaning tips. McCartney admitted some of his earliest shots in the exhibition are a little fuzzily focused. ‘‘I console myself that one of my favorite photographers, Julia Margaret Cameron, also liked soft focus,’’ he said.
“His photos get better as he practices,” Broadley noted. The exhibition and its accompanying book take visitors on a whirlwind trip through six cities beginning in Liverpool and London, and ending in Miami. The images from the British leg are exhibited in small ‘‘austerity’’ walnut frames, to indicate Britain was still in the throes of a postwar recession. The Fab Four might look nervous in these photos, but they had already reached stardom on their home turf, having bagged three No. 1 singles and met the queen.
After a brief stint performing at the Olympia in Paris, alongside Sylvie Vartan, they heard that “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was No. 1 on the American charts and sped to New York. The crowning moment in America was their live television debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show” on Feb. 9, 1964, singing five propulsive pop hits, an event watched by 73 million people.
In Miami, McCartney’s photos burst into Kodachrome color and the newly minted celebrities seem to bloom in glamorous new surroundings: lounging poolside, sipping scotch and riding around in motorboats. By April, the Beatles’ songs held the top five spots on the U.S. Billboard charts.
Musing on the images, he said, “There is an innocence to them,” adding, “I think it was a lot more fun than it was. We worked probably 360 days out of the year.” It was an all-too-brief halcyon period. Two and a half years later, the Beatles stopped touring. The logistics, the screams and the armored cars had become a nightmare.
Like most successful artists thriving past retirement age, McCartney has projectitis. He’s working on a new album with producer Andrew Watt (“Hackney Diamonds”), and just released the 50th anniversary remaster of the Paul McCartney & Wings classic “Band on the Run.” “His live shows continue to be of such high voltage one half expects him to burst into flames,” Irish poet Paul Muldoon wrote in McCartney’s recent book, “The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present.”
His next project is organizing a gallery sale of some of his photographs. “It’s a process I like,” he said, describing the joy of curating. “I’ve done it a few times with Linda’s work” — a reference to his first wife, photographer Linda Eastman.
His current homes, shared with his wife Nancy Shevell, are adorned with images by Linda and Mary, though, curiously, none of his own. But that may change. “The sale,” he said, “will probably encourage me to get some for myself.”