NEW YORK — As the ‘60s entered their middle third, there was a span of a few months when Western culture swung on a hinge. Things changed that much, that suddenly, that audibly. Even though this is a photography review, keep that non-visual word in mind.
That hinge was a compound of demographics, economics, technology. But four people did more than anyone else to make it swing freely. You can probably guess who they were. All these years later, the world remains on a first-name basis with them. Wouldn’t it have been great if one of them had had a camera and took pictures while the swing was happening, making the audible visible? One of them did.
Those pictures, more than 250 of them, make up “Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm.” It runs at the Brooklyn Museum through Aug. 18. The show also includes contacts sheets, a couple of videos, magazines, concert programs, books, an I’m a Beatles Booster pin, a Beatles Flip Your Wig board game, and, speaking of wigs, an “authentic” Beatles one in its original package. Imagine the restraint it must have taken on the part of the owner to leave it unopened.
More important, there’s an overall feeling of exhilaration and good cheer. “We had fun with each other,” McCartney says in a wall text, “whatever we did and wherever we went,” and that very much comes through. The feeling is evident in the people in the pictures then — not just the Beatles, but fans, family members, significant others, even the press. It’s evident in a different way in the people looking at these pictures now. Going to “Eyes of the Storm” is a bit like going to a wedding: A sense of general happiness is palpable (though in this case there’s also an awareness of the eventual divorce).
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Is that sense of happiness just a function of nostalgia? That’s inevitably part of any response to the show. But the friend I saw it with was born five years after the Beatles broke up. If anything, he felt even more transported by it — and that is the word — than the senescent Boomer beside him.
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When the Beatles began to meet with success, McCartney splurged and bought a serious camera, a Pentax 35mm, and began to photograph what was going on around him. “Everywhere I went I just took pictures,” he recalls. “I was definitely looking for interesting shots, angles, lighting, compositions.”
Soon enough, he put away the camera, and his photographic associations became familial. His first wife, Linda Eastman, was a photographer; and their daughter Mary McCartney is a photographer. It came as a surprise, to him as well as the rest of the world, when an archive of nearly a thousand photographs he’d taken in 1963 and ‘64 turned up in 2020.
Strictly speaking, not all of the photos are by McCartney. They couldn’t be, since he’s in a number of them. In those instances, he handed his camera to someone else to do the honors.
With disarming modesty, McCartney says, “I’m not setting out to be seen as a master photographer, more an occasional photographer who happened to be in the right place at the right time. We were just wondering at the world, just excited about all these little things that were making up our lives.”
Was the young Paul McCartney a great photographer? No, but he was perfectly fine: clearly engaged, highly curious, open to experiment without getting pretentious about it. More to the point, he was a photographer with a great subject — as he says, “in the right place at the right time.” With photography, more than in any other artistic enterprise, content can matter so much it becomes its own form. That’s the case here.
“Eyes of the Storm” begins on tour in England in November ‘63. It proceeds to Liverpool and London, and more concerts, in December and January. That month the Beatles go to Paris (there are shots of Ringo wearing a Napoleonic bicorne hat and George in a gendarme’s cap). Then in February Beatlemania crosses the Atlantic: New York; Washington, D.C.; Miami.
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There’s a slightly gawking, tourist aspect to some of the Paris and US photos. That wonder McCartney speaks of is very much present in how he shoots Manhattan. On the train from New York to Washington, he takes atmospheric shots through the window. He really is like a tourist in D.C., photographing the White House and Capitol.
In Florida, McCartney switched to color film. This made perfect sense visually, Miami being so chromatically different from those other places. It made even more sense symbolically. It’s like the shift from Kansas in “The Wizard of Oz.” Chronologically, the ‘50s had ended on Jan. 1, 1960. Now they were really over. The ‘60s, that most Oz-like of decades, had clearly arrived.
Any photograph is a portal opening on to the past, and the more distant in time the subject the more valuable the portal becomes. These photographs are a double portal: not only opening on to those four months from more than 60 years ago, a set of vivid moments; but also opening on to a process, even more vivid, in which we get to watch four young men become the most famous people in the world (or close to it). “It was like being in a very exciting film,” McCartney says, “and we were the stars.” Big, big stars.
The camera really did love them. It loved them all the more for there being nothing conventional about their good looks (other than Paul’s, of course). John had that blocky head and Plantagenet nose. George could look so dour, even severe. And Ringo was — Ringo. That said, what may be the single most delightful image in a show full of delightful images is a slightly blurred view of a happy-looking Richard Starkey, eyes closed, shaking his head. The expression on his face says, “I really can’t believe this is happening. Can you?”
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Celebrity culture had existed for millennia. What are emperors and monarchs but celebrities with crowns? The Beatles announced the democratizing of celebrity culture. The crowd becomes as much a part of the phenomenon as those being celebrated, and those being celebrated here are four young blokes (albeit wildly talented ones). The show includes shots of fans and photographers both. This enlarges a viewer’s sense of these four months and gives a Beatles’-eye view of what’s going on. It adds to the sense of intimacy McCartney’s photos convey.
One of the great enduring questions, admittedly meaningless, is: Who was the fifth Beatle? Candidates include their manager, Brian Epstein; their producer George Martin; the New York disc jockey Murray the K (who appropriated the title). Each shows up in “Eyes of the Storm.” Maybe the ultimate appeal of the show is that, for whatever portion of time a museumgoer is there, the question gets answered: The fifth Beatle is you.
PAUL McCARTNEY PHOTOGRAPHS 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm
At Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, N.Y., through Aug. 18. 718-638-5000, www.brooklynmuseum.org
Mark Feeney can be reached at [email protected].