The prestigious museum located in the heart of London will show this summer for its reopening more than two hundred never seen photos of the Beatles taken by Paul McCartney in 1963 and 1964, when their worldwide notoriety exploded.
Decidedly, the Beatles have the resource. More than 50 years after their separation, there are still and always new things to discover or unearth among the Fab Four, such as the formidable documentary Get Back by Peter Jackson proved it in 2021. This time it’s never before seen photos, taken by Paul McCartney at the start of their international rise, between December 1963 and February 1964.
For its reopening scheduled for this summer, the prestigious National Portrait Gallery in London, which has been renovated and completely refurbished since its closure in March 2020, will present the exhibition Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm from 28 June (and until 1er october).
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275 unpublished photos taken in the eye of the storm
Taken with a 35mm camera in New York, Washington, London, Liverpool, Miami and Paris, these 275 photos promise to give us an inside look at the experiences of the Beatles as they were propelled into Britain’s most popular band. to international cultural phenomenon, confronting Beatlemania madness. As all the lenses in the world began to focus on them and were never going to let go, Macca offers another look.
According to National Portrait Gallery director Nicolas Cullinan, it was Paul McCartney himself who contacted the museum after getting hold of a batch of several hundred photos he remembered taking but thought lost forever. .
“It was extraordinary to see these images – never before seen – of such an important, well-known and well-documented cultural moment.“, Mr Cullinan told the Guardian. “They were taken by someone who was, really, as the title of the exhibition alludes to it, in the eye of the storm.“, he adds.
At the heart of the cyclone that was Beatlemania and which was then sweeping the planet, Paul McCartney immortalized in particular the 21e George Harrison’s birthday and behind the scenes of the appearance of the Fab Four in February 1964 on the Ed Sullivan show (ultra popular television show in the United States) in front of 73 million Americans behind their small screens, a major milestone in the quartet’s global conquest English.
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A photo book will be published in June
Paul McCartney has always been sensitive to photography. His first wife Linda McCartney was a renowned photographer, the first woman to sign a magazine cover RollingStoneand their daughter Mary McCartney is also a photographer and director.
Those unable to travel to London this summer will be delighted to learn that Paul McCartney has planned to publish a book of 275 previously unseen photos from the exhibition in June, to coincide with his 81st birthday.