In the 1964 film A Hard Day\u2019s Night, it\u2019s Ringo who wanders the back streets of London with camera in hand. The other Fabs, though, were just as interested in photography, chronicling their travels and lives on film. Paul McCartney was technically the best behind the lens, as witness his fine 2023 portfolio 1964: Eyes of the Storm, but Harrison was no stranger to the art, even if, as George Saunders remarks in his afterword, \u201cThey\u2019re snapshots, really, made by a talented young guy with a new toy.\u201d The \u201cnew toy\u201d changed from time to time, as when Harrison acquired a fish-eye lens and snapped everything in sight with it, exulting, \u201ceverything looks mad through it!\u201d Olivia Harrison writes that her husband used the camera as \u201ca benign shield and playful way to deflect attention that followed him wherever he went.\u201d The cameras\u2014a Pentax SLR, a Polaroid SX-70, and many others\u2014also provided an archive that\u2019s much more relaxed than the usual run of Beatles-related photos, especially the series shot at the band\u2019s 1968 retreat in Rishikesh, India: Paul, looking all of 12 years old, earnestly shaving; John experiencing a characteristic agony of the acoustic guitarist, namely trying to get a dropped pick out of the thing; Ringo showing off some impressively white teeth in a madcap grin. The self-portraits are welcome, too, the best of them showing off a kid who seems thrilled by most of life, whether geeking out in Tahiti with what appears to be a strand of kelp or snapping the band horsing around at a Miami swimming pool. The photographs gathered here attest to George\u2019s own explanation for his interest: \u201cI like cameras because you can see things in a different way, and you can make things look how they feel instead of how they are.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the 1964 film A Hard Day\u2019s Night, it\u2019s Ringo who wanders the back streets of London with camera in hand. The other Fabs, though, were just as interested in photography, chronicling their travels and lives on film. Paul McCartney was technically the best behind the lens, as witness his fine 2023 portfolio 1964: Eyes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7466,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7465"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}