Long before iPhones and the 24/7 livestreams of celebrity’s lives, one musician was capturing his experience as a blossoming superstar.
In late 1963, at the dawn of Beatlemania, Paul McCartney started snapping pictures with a Pentax 35 mm camera — part of a set that someone had gifted the band.
Unlike his bandmates, McCartney had grown up in a household that valued photography. He took the camera and began capturing intimate moments from his everyday life during what would be a pop culture phenomenon.
Now, nearly 60 years after the Beatles performed their final concert at Candlestick Park, the Fab Four are returning to San Francisco in these never-before-seen photos — bowl cuts and all.
The de Young Museum is showcasing more than 250 photographs McCartney took between December 1963 and February 1964, displayed alongside images of the band members performing and traveling and ephemera from their first world tour.
In black-and-white and vibrant color, the photos capture behind-the-scenes moments in London, Paris, New York, Washington, D.C., and Miami. There the Beatles are, backstage with their lovers, throwing pillows at one another with looks of pure glee, sitting in hotel rooms writing songs that would define their generation.
“It was after the war, so things were brightening up, and I was being exposed to good art and good photography,” McCartney said.
McCartney rediscovered this trove of previously undeveloped images during the pandemic, when he was searching through his archive for gems to include in a show he was organizing of the work of his late wife, the photographer Linda McCartney. This prompted memories of the Pentax camera he was given as a 23-year-old pop star.
As it turned out, the negatives and contact sheets were still in his archives.
While paparazzi and the press documented Beatlemania extensively, the photos in this exhibition demystify the band and give viewers an inside look at what it was like to be a Beatle. The images show the wonder of a young man navigating an unprecedented level of fame and traveling through concrete jungles at a time of immense global change.
“We’ve only, as a public, experienced this moment from the perspective of onlookers clamoring to catch a glimpse of the band,” said Sally Martin Katz, de Young’s assistant curator of photography, who organized the exhibit. “Now we get to revisit and rewrite that history and understand it from an unseen personal insider’s perspective.”
McCartney’s photos are the 1960s equivalent of a Gen Z Instagram photo dump. The viewer gets to see unedited, low-stakes, and impressionistic images of the quotidian aspects of his extraordinary life. Photos of screaming crowds and police escorts are juxtaposed with mirror selfies, a cigarette hanging from his lips.
For viewers, the show takes a shocking turn when the band visits Miami and the shots turn to color. McCartney catches a fish. Harrison catches a buzz. Lennon catches a tan. The boys are having fun.
“It’s like we were living in a black-and-white world on the rest of the tour, and suddenly we’re in wonderland, Florida, the sun, the swimming pools,” McCartney said.
The show runs through July 6.