It’s hard to believe that, more than 60 years after four mop-topped young men in skinny suits upended the global music scene, there could be anything left to explore in the vast mythology of The Beatles. But Rearview Mirror: Photographs December 1963–February 1964, which opened last week at Gagosian in Beverly Hills, dares to say otherwise. A series of photographs taken by 21-year-old Paul McCartney with a 35-millimeter Pentax camera, the show chronicles the heady two months leading up the band’s life-changing performance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. Absorbed in sequence, the pictures offer a visual deep breath—and they remind us that long before the thrashing girls and Abbey Road and Yoko, there were four mischievous, clever lads who wanted to make music, caught in a rocket ride none of them could have foreseen.
It’s not a very big exhibition—36 mainly black-and-white photographs and photo strips, augmented with yellowed newspaper clippings and ticket stubs—but it still manages to pack a powerful, wistful punch. The images, almost all of them black and white, could easily be mistaken for those of a midcentury British collegian documenting a post-uni holiday with his mates.
John Lennon and George Harrison
McCartney snaps a picture of fans chasing his car from the rear window.
The exhibition’s resonance emerges from how unguarded each member of the band appears—which is perhaps to be expected, considering the lensman. A self-portrait of McCartney in his room in the Asher family home on Wimpole Street (where, in the early days, the band convened and composed regularly) captures a young man shy and awkward, seemingly unsure of himself; a photo of George, Ringo, and John backstage at the band’s Christmas show conjures three friends waiting at a bus stop, heading to the pub for a pint. One of the most mesmerizing images included in the show is a close-up of John Lennon, who leans into an almost photobombing pose, his expression expectant and devilish.
It is a testament to McCartney’s creative genius across mediums that the prints, each signed by him and retailing between $15,000 and $85,000, are all beautifully composed. But it’s the quartet’s unbridled sense of wonder and joy—captured in Ringo rehearsing or John splashing in Florida’s Biscayne Bay—that shines through. “Everywhere I went, I just took pictures,” McCartney declares in an epigraph at the very beginning of the exhibit. And thank god for that. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that an artist with as much genius as he had was able to produce images of the mundane that transcended into something deeply poignant. Because in the end his stirring photographs do what all great art does, what the Beatles themselves did. They leave you wanting more.
Inside the show.
Rearview Mirror: Photographs, December 1963–February 1964, is on view from April 25th through June 21st at Gagosian, 465 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, CA, gagosian.com.
