Paul McCartney he remembered himself with a camera, snapping shots of John, George and Ringo as he went, then turning the lens to face the fans, in a barely deliberate attempt to capture from all angles what would eventually become known as the beatlemania.
Paul had a hazy memory of all that. He knew that they were very young then, but he was not sure of the year or the places where he took the images. Suddenly one day, in 2020, searching through his archive for a photo exhibition about Linda, he finally came across that hidden treasure: dozens of negatives and dated contacts. between December 1963 and February 1964on the back of his second album, With the Beatlesand in full conquest of America.
A magical spring went off then in the mind of Paul, who was already finishing his 18th solo album at the time, McCartney III. Between theme and theme, she was taking shape in her mind what three years later has curdled in a book and an exhibition in style: Eyes of the Stormchosen by the National Portrait Gallery to celebrate its famous reopening.
They were three hectic months, captured with the freshness of the photographer amateur that Paul always carried inside, since he learned the secrets of the Kodak Brownie from his parents as a child. As a young man he dabbled in it with a Pentax 35mm, handy enough to take on tour in the early Beatles years, before the “storm” hit.
Those three months were somewhat like the compressed history of the band, beginning with the triumphant return to the Liverpool Empire, and from there to the 18 uninterrupted performances from the Olympia Music Hall in Paris, and then the jump to New York, the appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, the passage through snowy Washington and the last stop in Miami, where the dazzling leap from black and white to technicolor takes place.
One of Paul’s favorite photos is precisely that of George Harrison in a pool in Miamiwith pimples on her face, sunglasses and a cigarette in her hand, the same one with which she picks up a glass of whiskey and Coca Cola from the hand of a bather in a radiant yellow bikini like the ones Raquel Welch wore.
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