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Hundreds of long-lost photographs taken by Paul McCartney and capturing the onset of Beatlemania will exhibit at London’s National Portrait Gallery from June 28 through Oct. 1.
“Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of The Storm” features McCartney’s own unearthed and never-before-seen snapshots of the Beatles from December 1963 to February 1964, a three-month stretch that saw the Fab Four playing The Ed Sullivan Show, as well as celebrating George Harrison’s 21st birthday.
“Looking at these photos now, decades after they were taken, I find there’s a sort of innocence about them,” Paul McCartney shared in a statement. “Everything was new to us at this point. But I like to think I wouldn’t take them any differently today. They now bring back so many stories, a flood of special memories, which is one of the many reasons I love them all, and know that they will always fire my imagination.”
According to National Portrait Gallery director Dr. Nicholas Cullinan, McCartney approached the gallery after rediscovering the photographs in 2020. “He said he’d found these photographs that he remembers taking but thought had been lost. We sat down with him and began going through them. [It was] extraordinary to see these images – which are unseen – of such a well-documented, famous, and important cultural moment,” Cullinan said (via the Guardian).
“They’re taken by someone who was really, as the exhibition title alludes, in the eye of the storm looking outside at what was happening.”
McCartney’s stash of 275 photographs, taken with a 35mm camera, also documents the torrid three months where the Beatles played gigs in New York, Washington, London, Liverpool, Miami, and Paris.
“Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of The Storm” will be among the first exhibits at the recently refurbished National Portrait Gallery. “The fact that these photographs have been taken by the National Portrait Gallery for their reopening after a lengthy renovation is humbling yet also astonishing,” McCartney added. “I’m looking forward to seeing them on the walls, 60 years on.”
For Beatles fans who can’t make it to the London gallery during the exhibition, there’s also good news: McCartney plans on publishing a book featuring his unseen photographs around the time of his 81st birthday in June.
“We all know what Beatlemania looked and sounded like from the outside, but what did it look and feel like for the four pairs of eyes that lived and witnessed it first-hand?” Cullinan continued in a separate statement. “Over more than half a century, we have become familiar with press photographs showing the smiling Beatles and their screaming fans, but Paul McCartney’s intimate photographs have more in common with a family album, capturing people caught in off-guard moments of relaxation and laughter.”
