Gallery to sell signed copies of 36 photos Paul McCartney took at the peak of Beatlemania

When Joshua Chuang visited the hit 2023 show “Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm” at the National Portrait Gallery in London, he had the seeds of an idea. He had recently been appointed as a director specialising in photography at the mega Gagosian gallery, and the trove of Beatlemania images from McCartney’s archive made him think it would be an interesting project to pitch at the gallery. Little did Chuang know that McCartney himself had more or less contemporaneously approached Larry Gagosian, the gallery’s owner, with a similar idea. “He said, ‘I’m putting together this museum show, and I would love to know your ideas about maybe releasing a selection of these’,” Chuang recalls. “And that’s how it started.” Now, on April 25, the germination of that visit will culminate in a show of 36 artworks from McCartney’s personal collection at the Gagosian outpost in Beverly Hills, California. They range in starting price from about US$12,000 to “the high five figures”, Chuang says, adding that while the selection of photos is the gallery’s own, “there’s a large degree of overlap” with the museum show. A portion of the proceeds will go to Los Angeles’ wildfire recovery and rebuilding efforts. All the images were taken over the course of just three months in 1963 and 1964 as the band’s fame exploded. Shot in Liverpool, London, Paris, New York, Washington and Miami, they capture the internal and external lives of a group of young men suddenly thrust into superstardom. “They were among the most photographed people in the world at that point,” says Chuang. “And the fact they had the presence of mind to use their own cameras to point outwards during this moment is a really unique confluence of history and perspective.” Although many of the images in the museum and gallery shows are the same, the Gagosian team went to great lengths to make ultra-high-quality prints that distinguished the collectible pieces from the exhibition copies. McCartney’s collection contains a combination of negatives, contact sheets and colour slides. The black-and-white negatives were manifested as standard darkroom prints, “exposed digitally, but developed chemically”, Chuang explains. In the case of contact sheets whose negatives have been lost, the gallery made super high-resolution scans. The colour prints were made with an analogue colour process called dye sublimation, which “is incredibly saturated colours, and it also happens to be incredibly permanent”, Chuang says. “If we were working with a negative, there’s more information available, which in some cases would allow us to make a larger print,” he continues. “But we attempted in every case to produce something where you couldn’t tell whether it was from a contact sheet or a negative – we’ve really wrung out every bit of information from the original sources, so there shouldn’t be a great (difference) in the look of the images.” Each work will be editioned and signed by McCartney. Chuang says they’re still working out the exact size of the editions, although it will be finalised by the time the exhibition opens. Chuang is careful to point out that while they will be selling 36 artworks, several of the pieces have multiple frames printed on a single sheet, “so the actual number of images is much more”, he says. The exhibition comes at a moment when McCartney – never exactly obscure – is back in the spotlight. The original photo exhibition will soon open at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, and McCartney has also been performing in venues large and small, including the Saturday Night Live 50th Anniversary Special and three sold-out shows at the Bowery Ballroom in New York just this month. “The appeal of McCartney – it’s hard to overstate how wide it is and how easily and fluidly it crosses generations,” says Chuang, who anticipates an outpouring of interest in the Gagosian show from different groups of collectors. “One could look at them as works of art,” he says. “But I think that there’ll be a great appeal for people that collect Beatles memorabilia. It’s really the first time that these signed editions of his photographs are being offered.”

Gallery to sell signed copies of 36 photos Paul McCartney took at the peak of Beatlemania

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}McCartney’s photos, taken as the Beatles were finding global stardom, will go on show, and on sale, at the Gagosian gallery in Beverly Hills

McCartney’s photos, taken as the Beatles were finding global stardom, will go on show, and on sale, at the Gagosian gallery in Beverly Hills