Love Me Do; An Exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum this Summer Lets the Photographs of a Young Paul McCartney Make the Case

Photo Credit: Alexander Bernhardt Bloom

By Alexander Bernhardt Bloom | alex@queensledger.com

In the fall of 1963 Paul McCartney began to experiment with a 35-millimeter camera he owned, in the beginning shooting and posing for simple portraits at home with his brother Mike. He was twenty-one years old. He played the guitar left-handed. He’d earned a short measure of local fame in his native Liverpool alongside fellow band-members for playing covers of American Rock-and-Roll groups in nightclubs there at lunchtime.

But Paul McCartney was not Paul McCartney yet, nor were The Beatles the international superstars they would become in short time. As it happens, McCartney captured the months in the interim quite thoroughly, developing a quick dexterity with his little Pentax point-and-shoot as he carried it along when the band received the call for their first transatlantic tour. He took about a thousand of them, mostly in black and white and finally in brilliant color, but most of the photographs did not become part of The Beatles’ legend and lore, for they were buried in an archives of McCartney’s someplace and went unseen for many decades.

In 2020 McCartney uncovered them, and the show, Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-1964: Eyes of the Storm, on at the Brooklyn Museum this summer until August 18th, has finally brought them to the public.

Our collective imagination is so saturated with images of The Beatles that it can be jarring to see photos of the young band members you’ve never seen before. Their faces are fresh, their charisma palpable. They’re captured in preparation and in repose, in transit and in pensive pauses. The world was falling in love with them and we can see why.

Only, finally, the exhibit is as much about the subject of photography as it is about the Beatles who are the subjects of the photographs that make it up. McCartney was an amateur photographer in an era before everyone was. He caught moments the professionals couldn’t and from angles they hadn’t access. He photographed the photographers assigned to document the band’s meteoric rise – some of the pictures have a truly meta commentary to offer on the whole situation.

He photographed the unscripted mundane moments that proved just how cool the four of them were, worthy of the hype even when no one was looking. The photos are both documentary and artistic, diary and testimony; the exhibit, an homage to the medium and the rock band both.

Most of all, McCartney’s own excitement and awe are evident in his photos, in earnest, him looking through the single reflex lens and seeing the greatness that lay before them.