On The Fabulous Beatles’ first trip to America, Paul McCartney brought along, as any tourist would, his new 35mm Pentax SLR camera. He took photos from planes, trains, cars, and boats; in hotel rooms and television stations; in Central Park and on the beach in Miami. He took photos of friends, acquaintances, and strangers, walking on snow-covered streets and lounging by the pool.
Although I was not a Beatlemaniacal teenager when this took place – I wasn’t even born at the time – I am old enough to remember seeing a photo of McCartney, baby in his jacket, in the newspaper when he announced he’d left the band. During the years both prior to and following my seeing that picture, I spent an inordinate amount of time listening to, watching, reading about, and pondering the work of Paul McCartney, both as a Fab and after.
Those are things I continue to do until this day, so in early autumn 2025, I was swept up in a whirlwind over sixty years in the making when I saw, at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, an exhibition of McCartney’s photographs.1 1964: Eyes of the Storm was largely comprised of recently re-discovered photos2 taken during just three months in late 1963/early 1964, a period which culminated in that first US visit by The Beatles, when they recorded three Ed Sullivan Show appearances and performed concerts in Washington, DC and New York City.3 A dozen shots in the exhibition come from later in the year, taken in Australia and on their return to the US for their first full-fledged tour of these shores.
I can’t really imagine viewing McCartney or three particular friends of his as if they were simply ordinary people. Their four faces would soon become some of the most famous and recognized the world had ever seen. While some of the photos of them are similar to those that could be found in just about any family album, others would be visually engaging even if one had no clue as to the identities of the subjects. The double portrait of John Lennon looking in a mirror – evidently taken in a second mirror – has an ethereal and slightly disorienting quality, like something Julia Margaret Cameron might have taken had she been born a century later. A shot of Ringo Starr backstage at l’Olympia in Paris, with its low-key lighting and cigarette smoke, resembles a still from some classic film noir. The moody and dramatic photo of Lennon and George Harrison in a doorway on a street in Paris also looks like it could be a still from a gangster film – one of them could be on his way home to present his wife with the cannoli.
Other photos are notable because of the extraordinary circumstances in which The Beatles found themselves – throngs of fans at the airport, behind police barricades, running after their car on West Fifty-Eighth Street in New York City. These illustrate the excitement of both the audience and of McCartney himself at a critical juncture in the band’s career, when the fame, the adulation, and the mania were new.
On the train ride from New York City to Washington, DC during this trip, a reporter asked McCartney, “What place do you think this story of The Beatles is going to have on the history of Western culture?”
“You must be kidding with that question,” he replied. “Culture… it’s not culture.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a good laugh.”
From the perspective of sixty-two years later, it’s obvious McCartney was wrong; that trip was culture in the making – the first world-wide popular culture phenomenon, one that influenced all manner of other aspects of life. 1964: Eyes of the Storm presented a sociological, historical, and very personal time capsule of the now-distant past, when a rock and roll band could alter the consciousness of a generation.
And have a good laugh.
All photos © 1964 Paul McCartney under exclusive license to MPL Archive LLP
1 My friend Michael, also a Beatlefan, had given me the catalogue (Liveright Publishing Group, 2023) for my birthday over a year prior to my seeing the show, so I was already familiar with what I would see.
2 In 2020, while helping to organize an exhibition of his late wife Linda’s photographs, McCartney mentioned taking some himself, and they were subsequently found in the MPL archives. Many of the negatives could not be located, so the prints in the show were made from existing prints or contact sheets.
3 The February 9 and 16 Sullivan Show appearances were broadcast live; the February 23 show was recorded on the 9th. The Washington, DC concert took place at the Washington Colosseum on the 11th, and they performed two shows at Carnegie Hall on the 12th.