Paul McCartneyâs âRearview Mirrorâ exhibition, featuring a large black-and-white photograph of George Harrison and framed contact sheets and prints displayed on white walls.” width=”970″ height=”693″ data-caption=’Paul McCartney’s “Rearview Mirror” exhibition at Gagosian in Beverly Hills offers a rare, personal look at the earliest days of Beatlemania. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Artwork © Paul McCartney, Photo: Jeff McLane, Courtesy Gagosian</span>’>
Late last month, Paul McCartney stopped by Gagosian in Beverly Hills to check out the install of his new show, “Rearview Mirror,” which showcases thirty-seven photoworks taken by the music legend at the onset of Beatlemania in late 1963 and early 1964. Shot mainly on his 35mm Pentax SLR, the images are mostly black and white snaps chronicling a timeline that begins in Liverpool and London with rehearsals for The Beatles Christmas Show. In early 1964, McCartney captured the band’s residency at The Olympia Theatre in Paris, followed by their first U.S. tour in February with stops in New York, Washington, D.C., and Miami.
McCartney stayed longer at the gallery than curator Joshua Chuang expected—over an hour. Before he left, he stood outside for a photo in front of the billboard promoting the show. “We were out there for a minute, and I don’t know where these people came from,” laughs Chuang at his brush with modern-day Beatlemania. “They came from out of nowhere, running with their kids in tow. And he was so gracious.”
Included in “Rearview Mirror” is an early self-portrait taken in a room at the family home of his then-girlfriend, Jane Asher. It’s the same room where the melody for Yesterday came to him in a dream. At the time, The Beatles were riding several hits in the U.K., but the foreign market remained uncertain. The Paris engagement mattered, but the U.S. mattered more. McCartney was reluctant to arrive there without a hit song at their backs. That changed when one night at the George V Hotel in Paris, when they received word that I Wanna Hold Your Hand was top of the charts in the U.S.
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It’s easy to look back now and see them as iconic, but they were just kids (average age 22), hoping this music thing might work out. Landing at the newly named John F. Kennedy International Airport, following the President’s assassination just a few months before, they found bedlam like they hadn’t seen in Europe. Caravans lined streets and highways just to get a look at them as their car inched toward the Plaza. “So this is America,” Ringo Starr thought at the time. “They all seem out of their minds.”
Not fully aware of the stir they were causing, they showed up at CBS Studio 50 to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show. Right before the curtain went up, a stagehand asked McCartney, “You nervous?” “No, not really,” he responded. The stagehand retorted, “You should be. Seventy-three million people are watching.” It was the highest-rated broadcast of the era.
The biggest difference between the touring museum exhibition of McCartney’s photographs, “Eyes of the Storm” and the Gagosian show is that the latter is smaller and the artwork is for sale. Ranging from $15,000 to $80,000, pieces sometimes composed of several images from contact sheets provide variations on shots, context and narrative. But both shows were drawn from the roughly 1,000 prints McCartney found in storage during COVID.
Three shots at Gagosian are exclusive to the gallery. One is of the band (sans Paul) waiting backstage at their 1963 The Beatles Christmas Show. Another is a shot of Ringo at Miami’s Deauville Hotel rehearsing for the band’s second appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. An accidental light leak casts an amber mist over the drummer. A third is taken from their hotel room, a color shot looking down at the beach where fans wrote in the sand: “Bring Ringo + Paul. I love Paul.”
The images of adoring fans, cops, reporters and photographers all craning to get a look are captured in a frenetic, spontaneous manner that reflects a verité style popular in European cinema at the time. They also show some kinship with The Americans, Robert Frank’s seminal 1958 book of street photography.
“A lot of that was the secret behind The Beatles, we didn’t think things out too much. We were really spontaneous,” McCartney tells Chuang about his photographic style.
The Fab Four were familiar with U.S. culture through film but mainly through music and more specifically rockers like Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly (“The Beatles” combines Holly’s band, “The Crickets” and the Beat poets). They were moved by the blues and the Memphis sound especially. Their tours landed amidst the Civil Rights Movement, and the band refused to play before segregated audiences and denounced racism in interviews.
Less than twenty years after World War II, as seen from the U.K., the U.S. was a place of boundless possibility. “It was hard for us to believe that America, which had always been for us ‘the land of the free,’ failed to be free for so many different people,” McCartney writes in his forward to the “Eyes of the Storm” catalog.
While in Paris, they were composing songs for A Hard Day’s Night, their first film that would begin shooting in April. They continued to tour throughout 1964, returning to the U.S. and playing the Hollywood Bowl in the autumn and Shea Stadium the following year. But by the time they needed an armored car to get to San Francisco’s Candlestick Park in 1966, they had had enough of touring. As a studio band, they continued to grow in popularity, but each led separate lives, not appearing live again until their 1969 concert atop Apple Records in London.
A few months later, McCartney married photographer Linda Eastman and Lennon, Yoko Ono. Within a year, The Beatles were no more.
“He remembers a lot,” Chuang says of the 82-year-old McCartney. “Especially toward the end, it was a bittersweet history, the way they broke up, the infighting about money and all that stuff, creative rights. And then each going their separate ways, and John being assassinated. When Paul went solo, he didn’t play a Beatles song for decades. He needed to establish himself outside of his identity as a Beatle. It was only not too long ago that his repertoire became mostly Beatles. This project and the ‘Get Back’ documentary brought him back to fully embracing his legacy with the band.”
In his forward, McCartney recalls the dizziness of those days. “To look at the strength, to look at the love and the wonder of what we went through that’s captured in these photographs is the whole thing,” he writes. “It’s what makes life great.”
“Rearview Mirror: Photographs, December 1963–February 1964” is at Gagosian in Beverly Hills through June 21, 2025.
