Photographs play almost as important a role in the creative legacy of the Beatles as their music. Over the years, different photographers worked with the musicians of the Liverpool quartet.
Astrid Kirchherr was the first professional photographer to photograph the Liverpool quartet in Hamburg in 1962. Her photograph marks the beginning of the Beatles’ photographic history. Then photographer Angus McBean took the picture for the cover of their debut album, Please Please Me, released on February 11, 1963, showing the musicians standing on a balcony.
Next came photographer Michael Ward, who photographed the already famous Beatles in their hometown of Liverpool.
One of the most provocative photographs was taken by English photographer Robert Whitaker in 1966. His picture shows the Beatles dressed in white coats, surrounded by butchered carcasses and blood. Nearby lie decapitated plastic dolls. The musicians themselves came up with the concept, believing that their image as nice boys singing sweet little love songs needed a radical correction. When the album featuring this photograph on its cover went on sale, a scandal erupted. The public interpreted the image as promoting violence. Rather than withdraw the album from sale, the record company covered the original sleeve with another, more neutral photograph of the Beatles. But fans peeled away the replacement cover, revealing the shocking original underneath. Today, both photographs have become iconic.
Naturally, all the photographers who ever had the opportunity to photograph the Beatles eventually became wealthy. The copyrights to many of their photographs were valued at millions of dollars and changed hands repeatedly.
But the luckiest of them all was Scottish photographer Iain Macmillan. His photograph of the Beatles, taken on the morning of August 8, 1969, at the Abbey Road pedestrian crossing in London, became the most famous of them all. Macmillan's journey to worldwide fame took just fifteen minutes. That was how long the photo session lasted.
Fate came to photographer Macmillan in the person of Yoko Ono. Looking for someone who could professionally and inexpensively photograph her exhibition at London's Indica Gallery, the rather thrifty Ono came across thirty-year-old Macmillan, who was then earning extra money as a street photographer for London newspapers. The photographer completed Ono's assignment without insisting too much on payment and subsequently became the enterprising Japanese woman's personal paparazzo. The modest Scotsman was introduced to John Lennon. It was Macmillan whom Lennon remembered on a hot August day in 1969, when, just a couple of days before the deadline for the next album, it turned out that the cover was still unfinished and none of London's well-known photographers could be found in the summer heat.
The idea of being photographed at the Abbey Road pedestrian crossing came from Paul McCartney. The Beatles' creative leader followed a perfectly logical line of reasoning: the album had been recorded at a studio on Abbey Road in London's St John's Wood neighborhood. The studio was called Abbey Road Studios, and the album was also named Abbey Road. What else could possibly appear on the cover but Abbey Road itself? Which part of the street should be photographed was obvious to anyone with even a little creative imagination: the pedestrian crossing, of course. Its stripes symbolized life, with its periods of success and failure, and the movement forward without beginning or end.
Paul drew a sketch, and half an hour before noon, everyone arrived at the location. Macmillan had the foresight to bring a stepladder about three meters high. Climbing onto it, he took his position. A police officer agreed to stop traffic for a small fee. They had to hurry.
The first shot failed. A Mercedes suddenly emerged from someone's garage, and John turned his head toward the sound of its engine. In the second shot, the musicians were not walking in step. The third failed because of Macmillan himself. He pressed the shutter too late, after the musicians had passed the center of the crossing, and the composition was slightly off. In the fourth, he was late again.
There was little time left. The driver of a public bus, waiting for the photo session to end so he could continue his route, was becoming visibly impatient. Everyone concentrated. Two more attempts! Nobody even noticed that when the quartet crossed the street for the fifth time, Paul had forgotten to throw away the cigarette he had just lit and walked into the picture holding it in his hand.
In the final shot, three strangers appeared in the frame: construction workers returning from lunch. But it was too late to correct anything. The uninvited participants, who had been lucky enough to be photographed alongside the Beatles, would spend the rest of their lives boasting about it to relatives, friends, and acquaintances. When the time came to select the photograph for the album cover, the one with the cigarette was chosen. The other shots were published much later and became famous in their own right.
When the session at the crossing was over, Paul asked Macmillan to photograph the street sign for the back cover. Macmillan climbed down from his ladder, walked around the corner to where Abbey Road meets Alexandra Road, set up his camera and failed to notice a little girl in a blue dress stepping into the frame just as he pressed the shutter. Any photographer who made so many mistakes would have lost his job. But once again, Macmillan was lucky. Under the particular circumstances of the session, his mistakes brought the images to life and were regarded as creative discoveries.
Macmillan remained the family photographer of John Lennon and Yoko Ono and followed the couple to New York. He helped design Ono's books and albums and produced covers for the couple's joint singles. The Scotsman became extraordinarily wealthy. After Lennon's death, he decided to give up the turbulent life of New York and returned to his native Scotland. There, in the land of mist, he enjoyed peace and solitude with his beloved dog until lung cancer brought his life to an end.
Only once, in 1993, did he have to leave his quiet retreat and travel to London for a day. Paul McCartney wanted to recreate the famous pedestrian-crossing photograph for his solo album, this time alone, without his former bandmates. The copyright to the photograph belonged to Macmillan, so Paul could not proceed without his involvement.
The photograph, whose rights passed through numerous transactions and eventually came into the possession of McCartney and Apple Records, has become permanently associated in the minds of people everywhere with the cult of the Beatles. Thousands of parodies have been made of the image. It has been copied, used in advertisements, retouched, turned into collages and subjected to just about every imaginable transformation.
The Abbey Road crossing itself has also become a historical and cultural symbol of the era and, of course, a place of pilgrimage for Beatles fans. The Abbey Road Studios website streams images from a webcam installed outside the studio entrance, with the pedestrian crossing clearly visible. At any moment, people all over the world can watch what is happening on the famous zebra crossing. And something is happening there almost constantly.
Sometimes groups of fans gather simply to stand and meditate. Sometimes a tourist attempts to photograph himself on the crossing. And every year, on August 8, the anniversary of the photograph, the road has to be closed because thousands of pilgrims converge on the site. The disruption to traffic irritates the London authorities. At one point, there was an idea to solve the problem in the simplest possible way: paint over the white stripes, and that would be the end of it. But the risk of provoking an enormous outcry from Beatles fans proved too great, and the plan had to be abandoned.
Several years ago, an American named Paul Cole suddenly announced that the man standing beside the police car in the right-hand background of the photograph was none other than himself. He had supposedly been visiting London as a tourist. “I saw these strange fellows running back and forth across the crossing like ducklings,” he recalled in essence. “So I stopped to watch. It all looked rather peculiar.” His curiosity brought the enterprising tourist a considerable income. After all, from the standpoint of laws governing the publication of images of private individuals in public places and the media, he was no less important than the Beatles and had the same rights to his image as the four men in the foreground. In short, McCartney had to buy the rights to the image of his namesake.
The white Volkswagen parked on the left side of the photograph also had an extraordinary fate. Driving around in a car bearing the world-famous license plate LMW 281F had become impossible. Its owner eventually had to put the vehicle up for auction. Abracadabra! And here is a little mathematical puzzle: how much did the old Volkswagen sell for if, immediately afterward, its owner bought himself a brand-new Rolls-Royce?
The metal Abbey Road street sign also had to be removed because fans had covered it with too many autographs. The London authorities put it up for auction on eBay. The amount raised was never disclosed, although it was reportedly enough to modernize the capital's bus fleet. But since a city cannot do without street signs altogether, nanotechnology came to London's rescue. The new sign is safe from the fans: its surface is protected by a special coating designed to prevent damage.
In the 1990s, when America was consumed by its campaign against smoking, the United States Congress in Washington published a special amendment banning the depiction of smokers in the mass media. As a result, the cigarette was removed from McCartney's hand in American reproductions of the photograph, whether on posters or album covers.
The famous Abbey Road recording studio, which celebrated its eightieth anniversary in 2011, was placed on the list of Britain's cultural landmarks of national importance by English Heritage. According to press reports, the British government's decision was based on the fact that some of the century's most outstanding musical works had been recorded within the walls of Abbey Road Studios. Indeed, in addition to the Beatles, the studio has welcomed such stars as Pink Floyd, U2, Duran Duran, Cliff Richard, Take That, Red Hot Chili Peppers and many others.
The Beatles' album Abbey Road has earned a place among the greatest musical albums in history. It has been reissued numerous times and continues to enjoy extraordinary popularity.