You can pick up one of the 12 prints on display at Gagosian Gallery Davies Street in London for anything between $20,000 and $85,000 (\u00a315,000 to \u00a363,000). A bargain, when you consider that they\u2019re the recently rediscovered juvenile work of a photographer named Paul McCartney.<\/p>\n
We saw some of these images as part of a much bigger exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 2023. The pictures, which were taken during the early months of Beatlemania and thought lost, were uncovered in McCartney\u2019s archive during the pandemic \u2014 but this is the first (and possibly the only) time that he\u2019s issued any of them as hand-signed limited editions, of between six and eight, for sale.<\/p>\n
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Dressing room at the Lewisham Odeon, December 8, 1963<\/p>\n
PAUL MCCARTNEY: REARVIEW MIRROR<\/p>\n
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George, Ringo and John backstage at the Finsbury Park Astoria, December 1963<\/p>\n
PAUL MCCARTNEY: REARVIEW MIRROR<\/p>\n
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Photographers, fans and police in Paris, January 1964<\/p>\n
PAUL MCCARTNEY: REARVIEW MIRROR<\/p>\n
Most of the negatives are indeed lost, so these, predominantly black and white, have been recreated from tiny contact sheets, carefully cleaned and blown up. They\u2019ve been remastered, if you like, and printed with a hybrid digital and manual process that enhances their clarity while preserving their analogue materiality.<\/p>\n
They are worth seeing and not just for their cultural significance, though that is huge. Shot over the two months before the Beatles\u2019 arrival in America, they\u2019re a rock photography unicorn in that they show you exactly what you want to see (genuinely intimate moments and things the band themselves were seeing for the first time) through the eyes of the person whose head you really want to get into.<\/p>\n
In one of the two back rooms (just ask to see them, it\u2019s fine) there\u2019s a lovely image of John Lennon playing a Gibson guitar in a hotel room, hours before the telegram arrived notifying them that I Want to Hold Your Hand had gone to No 1 in the US, and the famous pillow fight ensued (captured by Harry Benson, a photojournalist who appears here, looking annoyed that he\u2019s been sent to Paris to cover this bunch of idiots. He quickly became one of the pack).<\/p>\n
\u2022 David Bailey at 87: \u2018It\u2019s always about the next picture\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n Self-portrait at the family home of McCartney\u2019s girlfriend, Jane Asher, in Wimpole Street, London, December 1963<\/p>\n PAUL MCCARTNEY: REARVIEW MIRROR<\/p>\n John backstage at the London Palladium, January 12, 1964<\/p>\n PAUL MCCARTNEY: REARVIEW MIRROR<\/p>\n At London Airport (with Brian Epstein, Mal Evans,and Neil Aspinall), February 7, 1964<\/p>\n PAUL MCCARTNEY: REARVIEW MIRROR<\/p>\n What looks like a posed, pensive shot of Lennon reflected in a mirror is actually the blinky moment after he\u2019s put his contact lenses in \u2014 another picture shows him in his NHS glasses, which he hated wearing in public.<\/p>\n But they\u2019re also just really good photographs. You can see from the contacts that McCartney is not shooting willy-nilly on his 35mm Pentax but has a sharp eye for light \u2014 when it falls on Lennon\u2019s face in the back of a car, or follows the line of Ringo Starr\u2019s jaw next to the window on a plane. McCartney is a consummate storyteller \u2014 as in his songwriting, his images are character and narrative-driven. Overall they tell a captivating tale, of four young men having the time of their lives, just before their lives are changed for ever.![\"Black](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/\/0888f1cd-72ed-4084-8e57-c553ea1881fe.jpg\")
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Gagosian Gallery Davies Street, London, Aug 28 to Oct 4; gagosian.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The term \u201caffordable\u201d is always relative but when it comes to something that many people would give their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":102527,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-102526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}