On Thursday, The UK’s National Portrait Gallery unveiled five photos from Paul McCartney’s personal archives, teasing a series of unseen photographs of Beatlemania through his own eyes.
The exhibition, “Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes Of The Storm”, will run for three months from the 28th of June and is set to showcase what McCartney calls a “humbling yet also astonishing” experience.
McCartney approached the gallery in 2020, after stumbling across the images taken on his Pentax camera, which he thought were lost.
“Looking at these photos now, decades after they were taken, I find there’s a sort of innocence about them,” he said..
“Everything was new to us at this point. But I like to think I wouldn’t take them any differently today.
“They now bring back so many stories, a flood of special memories, which is one of the many reasons I love them all, and know that they will always fire my imagination,” he added.
The images include black-and-white self-portraits shot in a mirror in Paris, John Lennon also in the City of Love, George Harrison in Miami Beach, and Ringo Starr in London.
These are five out of the 250 images shot by McCartney between November 1963 and February 1964, and the exhibition will feature in the London gallery’s reopening after three years of refurbishments.
An accompanying book of photographs and reflections will also be published on June 13.
Click here to see the five recently released images.
Images: 1964 Paul McCartney / National Portrait Gallery
This article first appeared on Over60.