Post by JoJo on Feb 26, 2006 13:45:09 GMT -5
From this Newspaper article. Amazing that this Herald photographer was able to gain such intimate access to The Beatles, and that no one even knew these prints existed, at least to this extent.
The Sunday Herald is giving away rare Beatles prints which have lain in an archive for over 30 years. But how did these iconic images by photojournalist Michael Peto remain undiscovered for so long? And how come they ended up in Dundee?
By Torcuil Crichton
THERE are four frames of Paul McCartney, unshaven, cigarette hanging from his mouth, hands resting by the studio piano. It’s 1965, so the world is still monochrome, but everything is about to change. Somewhere, between McCartney’s fingers and the piano keys, the lyrics for Yesterday are being formed and as you look at the pictures you can’t help but imbue the images with the elusive, sentimental yearning of that song.
Now These Days Are Gone – an ongoing, London-based exhibition of photo- journalist Michael Peto’s Beatles pictures, evokes that kind of intimacy. Here, in the quiet of a virtually empty Hooper’s Gallery, you almost expect McCartney to start singing.
Nobody knows how Peto, an acclaimed, Hungarian-born photographer who worked extensively for The Observer, came to document The Beatles just as they were on the cusp of changing from an outrageously popular beat combo into one of the most incredible musical phenomena in history. None of his surviving colleagues at The Observer remembers commissioning the shoot and none of the resulting images were ever published .
The Peto collection was donated by his family to Dundee University, where his stepson Michael Fodor had been a student, after the photographer died on Christmas Day, 1970. Although the university always knew the collection contained photographs of the Fab Four, it was only when archiving got under way in the late 1990s that staff realised Peto had been granted unprecedented inside access to the most famous pop band ever.
“We don’t know why he was there but he must have been trusted because we see The Beatles as young boys, their hair unkempt, not moptops at all,” says Patricia Whatley, the university archivist who worked on the massive hinterland of the Peto collection. “But how he managed that access we haven’t been able to find out.”
Peto is most famous for capturing working-class life, but alongside the studies of coal miners and jute mill workers are images of the famous, including portraits of Richard Burton recording Dylan Thomas’s play for voices, Under Milk Wood, with Elizabeth Taylor in attendance. The archive also contains the only existing photographs of CS Lewis and his wife. Some 20,000 of the 130,000 Peto images have now been digitised by the university. A mere 42 of the 400-plus Beatles images have been reprinted on silver bromide for this exhibition .
Some of the pictures displayed here are obviously from press photocalls: the Fab Four facing the media when their MBEs were announced; location stills from the shooting of Help! on Salisbury Plain. But it’s plain that Peto’s relationship with the group went well beyond the photocall.
He, a Hungarian outsider, managed to capture marvellously candid pictures of the group at the Antrobus Arms Hotel, in Amesbury, where they sheltered from the harsh moorland wind during the filming of Help! in early 1965.
Part of the collection shows the band in the hotel dining room. A horn-rimmed, starched-aproned waitress is serving afternoon tea to John Lennon – juxtaposing symbols of Britain’s staid past and its new, exciting future. There are shots of Paul McCartney and George Harrison, bathed in natural light, as icons of youth and beauty. It’s not hard to see why these men were held in public adoration. They look like young Olympians, at a time when they were tearing themselves away from teenage hysteria and ascending to another musical plane.
The previous year, 1964, Bob Dylan had introduced the Beatles to marijuana and, in some of Peto’s studio location pictures for Help!, the four boys (they were in their 20s but look younger) are giggling their heads off. The weed might have been a distraction to what they later acknowledged was a boring filming process and a lacklustre musical phase.
That June, Dylan released Like A Rolling Stone, a groundbreaking six minutes of grating, coruscating lyrics and sweeping musical grandeur that left the musical mainstream trailing in his wake. The explosive teenage power of The Who and the lasciviousness of the Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction was moving music on, and it took even The Beatles a while to catch up.
Help! was generally considered a poor offering but 1965 was the year The Beatles began to shed their moptop, boy-band image and embarked on an altogether different journey. By the end of the year they had recorded Rubber Soul. Revolver followed in 1966 and then Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. All three are among the most critically acclaimed albums in the history of popular music.
Drugs, while perhaps taking the edge off their obligations on Help!, became part of the creative process. In late 1965, a Bayswater dentist introduced George Harrison and John Lennon to LSD. Everything, from Yellow Submarine, Eastern mysticism and the eventual unravelling of the band in 1970, can be linked to that moment.
Others documented the latter part of the journey but in that crucial year Peto didn’t just get behind the bolted door of the Salisbury Plain hotel. He managed to insinuate his way into the recording studio where we find John Lennon wearing the corduroy cap, his homage to Dylan, and the trademark short suede jacket. You see the change in their choice of dress, and the presence, in frame, of their influential musical producer George Martin. This is the beginning of Rubber Soul, the end of the Fab Four.
Colin Jones, a fellow Observer photographer and a protégé of Peto who adopted his artistic approach to photojournalism, reckons that Brian Epstein, The Beatles’ manager, was the interlocutor. Management was different then and despite the popularity of the band there weren’t layers of publicists to get through.
Jones also puts the photos’ unpublished status into context. “Peto may have been commissioned by one of the picture editors but nobody can remember doing it,” says Jones, recalling the halcyon days of Fleet Street. “They may not have been used because, as you can imagine, they may have had an overload of The Beatles at the time. They affected kids, their parents, archbishops and presidents, they were everywhere and everyone was talking about them. But if I’d been a picture editor today and sent a photographer out to get a set of pictures and they came back with that, they’d get a bonus.”
The real mystery of the pictures lies not in the access Peto gained to the musicians, but in the intimacy of the resulting shots. Peto somehow managed to don a cloak of invisibility in the studio but also create a personal relationship with the band. They are un-self-conscious and trusting in front of his lens.
There is, for example, a sequence of photographs of Ringo Starr, one of the two surviving Beatles, at home with his first wife Maureen Cox , just after their marriage in February 1965 . The images carry their own poignancy. Cox and Starr divorced in acrimony and she died of leukaemia in the 1990s, but the pictures buzz with life. Her beehive, his moptop, the pink poodle (his wedding present to her), denote the Beatlemania of the time, while Cox’s knitting and a telegram provide more prosaic reminders of the era.
And what a time it was. Britain, under Prime Minister Harold Wilson, was still an overwhelmingly working-class country, substantially industrial but with rising prosperity and a popular culture pushing against the boundaries of the established order. The Beatles, charming lads who sang about the pleasure and pain of love, were at the forefront of a youthful revolution. Peto caught that, but then he glimpsed for us their greater musical genius too.
According to biographies, McCartney composed the entire melody of Yesterday in a dream one night at the Wimpole Street flat of his then girlfriend, Jane Asher. Upon waking, he hurried to a piano, turned on a tape recorder, and played the tune to avoid it slipping away. John Lennon later indicated that the song had been around for months before Paul put any words other than “scrambled eggs” to it, and then several more before it was accepted by the band. What isn’t in doubt is that the director of Help!, Richard Lester, was much annoyed by McCartney repeatedly playing the unfinished song on the piano placed on one of the stage sets of the film. And that, one would like to think, is the moment Michael Peto snapped the shutter on his Leica and captured a legend in the making.
These Days Are Gone is at Hoopers Gallery, 15 Clerkenwell Close, London, until next Sunday. It will show in Dundee in June and July 2007. For information about limited edition books linked to the exhibition and order details contact www.genesis-publications.com
www.dundee.ac.uk/archives/petosample.htm
The Sunday Herald is giving away rare Beatles prints which have lain in an archive for over 30 years. But how did these iconic images by photojournalist Michael Peto remain undiscovered for so long? And how come they ended up in Dundee?
By Torcuil Crichton
THERE are four frames of Paul McCartney, unshaven, cigarette hanging from his mouth, hands resting by the studio piano. It’s 1965, so the world is still monochrome, but everything is about to change. Somewhere, between McCartney’s fingers and the piano keys, the lyrics for Yesterday are being formed and as you look at the pictures you can’t help but imbue the images with the elusive, sentimental yearning of that song.
Now These Days Are Gone – an ongoing, London-based exhibition of photo- journalist Michael Peto’s Beatles pictures, evokes that kind of intimacy. Here, in the quiet of a virtually empty Hooper’s Gallery, you almost expect McCartney to start singing.
Nobody knows how Peto, an acclaimed, Hungarian-born photographer who worked extensively for The Observer, came to document The Beatles just as they were on the cusp of changing from an outrageously popular beat combo into one of the most incredible musical phenomena in history. None of his surviving colleagues at The Observer remembers commissioning the shoot and none of the resulting images were ever published .
The Peto collection was donated by his family to Dundee University, where his stepson Michael Fodor had been a student, after the photographer died on Christmas Day, 1970. Although the university always knew the collection contained photographs of the Fab Four, it was only when archiving got under way in the late 1990s that staff realised Peto had been granted unprecedented inside access to the most famous pop band ever.
“We don’t know why he was there but he must have been trusted because we see The Beatles as young boys, their hair unkempt, not moptops at all,” says Patricia Whatley, the university archivist who worked on the massive hinterland of the Peto collection. “But how he managed that access we haven’t been able to find out.”
Peto is most famous for capturing working-class life, but alongside the studies of coal miners and jute mill workers are images of the famous, including portraits of Richard Burton recording Dylan Thomas’s play for voices, Under Milk Wood, with Elizabeth Taylor in attendance. The archive also contains the only existing photographs of CS Lewis and his wife. Some 20,000 of the 130,000 Peto images have now been digitised by the university. A mere 42 of the 400-plus Beatles images have been reprinted on silver bromide for this exhibition .
Some of the pictures displayed here are obviously from press photocalls: the Fab Four facing the media when their MBEs were announced; location stills from the shooting of Help! on Salisbury Plain. But it’s plain that Peto’s relationship with the group went well beyond the photocall.
He, a Hungarian outsider, managed to capture marvellously candid pictures of the group at the Antrobus Arms Hotel, in Amesbury, where they sheltered from the harsh moorland wind during the filming of Help! in early 1965.
Part of the collection shows the band in the hotel dining room. A horn-rimmed, starched-aproned waitress is serving afternoon tea to John Lennon – juxtaposing symbols of Britain’s staid past and its new, exciting future. There are shots of Paul McCartney and George Harrison, bathed in natural light, as icons of youth and beauty. It’s not hard to see why these men were held in public adoration. They look like young Olympians, at a time when they were tearing themselves away from teenage hysteria and ascending to another musical plane.
The previous year, 1964, Bob Dylan had introduced the Beatles to marijuana and, in some of Peto’s studio location pictures for Help!, the four boys (they were in their 20s but look younger) are giggling their heads off. The weed might have been a distraction to what they later acknowledged was a boring filming process and a lacklustre musical phase.
That June, Dylan released Like A Rolling Stone, a groundbreaking six minutes of grating, coruscating lyrics and sweeping musical grandeur that left the musical mainstream trailing in his wake. The explosive teenage power of The Who and the lasciviousness of the Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction was moving music on, and it took even The Beatles a while to catch up.
Help! was generally considered a poor offering but 1965 was the year The Beatles began to shed their moptop, boy-band image and embarked on an altogether different journey. By the end of the year they had recorded Rubber Soul. Revolver followed in 1966 and then Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. All three are among the most critically acclaimed albums in the history of popular music.
Drugs, while perhaps taking the edge off their obligations on Help!, became part of the creative process. In late 1965, a Bayswater dentist introduced George Harrison and John Lennon to LSD. Everything, from Yellow Submarine, Eastern mysticism and the eventual unravelling of the band in 1970, can be linked to that moment.
Others documented the latter part of the journey but in that crucial year Peto didn’t just get behind the bolted door of the Salisbury Plain hotel. He managed to insinuate his way into the recording studio where we find John Lennon wearing the corduroy cap, his homage to Dylan, and the trademark short suede jacket. You see the change in their choice of dress, and the presence, in frame, of their influential musical producer George Martin. This is the beginning of Rubber Soul, the end of the Fab Four.
Colin Jones, a fellow Observer photographer and a protégé of Peto who adopted his artistic approach to photojournalism, reckons that Brian Epstein, The Beatles’ manager, was the interlocutor. Management was different then and despite the popularity of the band there weren’t layers of publicists to get through.
Jones also puts the photos’ unpublished status into context. “Peto may have been commissioned by one of the picture editors but nobody can remember doing it,” says Jones, recalling the halcyon days of Fleet Street. “They may not have been used because, as you can imagine, they may have had an overload of The Beatles at the time. They affected kids, their parents, archbishops and presidents, they were everywhere and everyone was talking about them. But if I’d been a picture editor today and sent a photographer out to get a set of pictures and they came back with that, they’d get a bonus.”
The real mystery of the pictures lies not in the access Peto gained to the musicians, but in the intimacy of the resulting shots. Peto somehow managed to don a cloak of invisibility in the studio but also create a personal relationship with the band. They are un-self-conscious and trusting in front of his lens.
There is, for example, a sequence of photographs of Ringo Starr, one of the two surviving Beatles, at home with his first wife Maureen Cox , just after their marriage in February 1965 . The images carry their own poignancy. Cox and Starr divorced in acrimony and she died of leukaemia in the 1990s, but the pictures buzz with life. Her beehive, his moptop, the pink poodle (his wedding present to her), denote the Beatlemania of the time, while Cox’s knitting and a telegram provide more prosaic reminders of the era.
And what a time it was. Britain, under Prime Minister Harold Wilson, was still an overwhelmingly working-class country, substantially industrial but with rising prosperity and a popular culture pushing against the boundaries of the established order. The Beatles, charming lads who sang about the pleasure and pain of love, were at the forefront of a youthful revolution. Peto caught that, but then he glimpsed for us their greater musical genius too.
According to biographies, McCartney composed the entire melody of Yesterday in a dream one night at the Wimpole Street flat of his then girlfriend, Jane Asher. Upon waking, he hurried to a piano, turned on a tape recorder, and played the tune to avoid it slipping away. John Lennon later indicated that the song had been around for months before Paul put any words other than “scrambled eggs” to it, and then several more before it was accepted by the band. What isn’t in doubt is that the director of Help!, Richard Lester, was much annoyed by McCartney repeatedly playing the unfinished song on the piano placed on one of the stage sets of the film. And that, one would like to think, is the moment Michael Peto snapped the shutter on his Leica and captured a legend in the making.
These Days Are Gone is at Hoopers Gallery, 15 Clerkenwell Close, London, until next Sunday. It will show in Dundee in June and July 2007. For information about limited edition books linked to the exhibition and order details contact www.genesis-publications.com
www.dundee.ac.uk/archives/petosample.htm
