Gagosian LA will showcase 36 photos, including some that have never been seen before, that the singer-songwriter took in 1963 and 1964.
This spring, the art gallery Gagosian LA will exhibit 36 of Paul McCartney‘s recently rediscovered photos, including some that featured in the former Beatle’s Eyes of the Storm book and many that have never been shown before.
The photos were taken between December 1963 and February 1964. And the exhibition, titled “Rearview Mirror: Photographs, December 1963–February 1964,” opens April 25 and runs through June 21.
One never-before-circulated shot (above) is an artistic view of Ringo Starr in a loose-fitting white shirt, drumming at Miami Beach’s Hotel Deauville ahead of the the Beatles’ second Ed Sullivan Show appearance. McCartney took the photo on Feb. 15, 1964.
“The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein arranged for the band to play two live appearances on the popular Sunday television program, The Ed Sullivan Show: the first on Feb. 9 from the show’s New York-based studio, and the second a week later, on Feb. 16, from Miami,” Joshua Chuang, director specializing in photography at Gagosian, tells Rolling Stone.
“The second performance was broadcast from the Deauville Hotel, the beachside resort in Miami Beach where the Beatles also stayed. At this point, Beatlemania was officially gaining steam in America and cheering fans were a constant; the press nicknamed the hotel ‘Beatle Central,’ as fans milled about the grounds and wrote the band messages in the sand below their balconies.
ロンドンのナショナル・ポートレート・ギャラリー（国立肖像画美術館）で開催されたポールの展覧会「ポール・マッカートニー写真展1963―1964～Eyes of the Storm～」が、来年、日本にて開催されます。 pic.twitter.com/uAdHckrtFK
— Paul McCartney : 日本 (@PaulMcCartneyJp) June 30, 2023
“The Beatles rehearsed for their performance in the hotel’s ‘cool room’ near its outdoor pool, wearing hotel-issued toweling shirts,” Chuang continues. “McCartney took photographs of his bandmates as they practiced their six-song set. Lennon, ever-so-cool, strums his guitar while wearing sunglasses, while Starr is framed in a psychedelic fog — an inadvertent interaction of light and chemistry that resulted in a one-of-kind image.”
The exhibition includes other photos taken at the Deauville, as well as early selfies and images of Beatlemania. Prices for the photos, which are individually signed, will range from $15,000 to the high five figures. Proceeds from the sales of the photos will benefit recovery efforts for those affected by the recent southern California wildfires.
“We didn’t really know how important Ed Sullivan was,” he says. “We hadn’t heard of him. … By the time we got to America, that was the coolest thing. But when we went on this show, we didn’t realize the significance. It’s just another TV show, we thought.”
Paul McCartney is releasing a photography book compiling 275 of his snapshots taken between the end of 1963 and the beginning of 1964—when Beatlemania was becoming a global phenomenon. 1964: Eyes of the Storm will be published June 13 by Liveright/W. W. Norton. The 35mm images are McCartney’s personal record of the time, and capture the Beatles’ travels through Liverpool, London, Paris, New York, Washington, D.C., and Miami. Watch a trailer for the book below.
“Anyone who rediscovers a personal relic or family treasure is instantly flooded with memories and emotions, which then trigger associations buried in the haze of time,” McCartney wrote in press materials. “This was exactly my experience in seeing these photos, all taken over an intense three-month period of travel, culminating in February 1964.”
It was a wonderful sensation to be plunged right back. Here was my own record of our first huge trip, a photographic journal of The Beatles in six cities, beginning in Liverpool and London, followed by Paris (where John and I had been ordinary hitchhikers three years before), and then what we regarded as the big time, our first visit as a group to America.
1964: Eyes of the Storm includes several never-before-seen portraits of John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, as well as a foreword by McCartney, an introduction by Harvard historian and New Yorker essayist Jill Lepore, a Preface by Nicholas Cullinan, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, and an essay by Senior Curator Rosie Broadley. The process of creating the book began in 2020, when a trove of nearly 1,000 of McCartney’s photographs were re-discovered in his archive.
‘Lost’ Beatles photos by Paul McCartney to go on show at National Portrait Gallery. The exhibit will open on June.
