Photo shoot with Richard Avedon

In January 1965, the US photographer Richard Avedon met The Beatles at the Ad Lib club in London while he was in town for an assignment for the magazine Harper’s Bazaar.

On January 26, Avedon shot portrait photos of Paul McCartney in a photographic studio at Thompson House, 200 Gray’s Inn Road, London. Paul was dressed as an astronaut, and some of the photos also featured English model and actress Jean Shrimpton. One of these shots was published in Harper’s Bazaar in April 1965.

As a sophisticated New Yorker, [Richard Avedon’s] interest in the arts was broad and far from superficial. The range of artists, performers, and writers he gathered for the April 1965 issue [of Harper’s Bazaar] fills a decidedly Pop but still idiosyncratic time capsule. Models in silvery space suits (courtesy NASA) share the editorial pages with Avedon’s portraits of Bob Dylan, Robert Rauschenberg, Paul McCartney, Jasper Johns, and Ringo Starr. A model in a negligee perches atop the bureau in Claes Oldenburgs Bedroom Ensemble, and work by Roy Lichtenstein, George Segal, and Stan VanDerBeek crops up between photos of dancers “fragging the fat away” and a portfolio of young London couples in modified Mod gear. Like the source images for most of Andy Warhol’s silkscreen portraits, the photos on the contributors’ page were all taken in photobooths. The issue was a bold exclamation point — exuberant, celebratory, playful — at once knowing and agog.

From “Avedon fashion” by Richard Avedon, 2009

Three days later, on January 29, Richard Avedon shot a portrait photo of Ringo wearing a laurel wreath, resembling a Roman emperor. This photograph was first published in the Daily Mirror on May 12, 1965, under the headline “Hail, Ringo.”

Richard Avedon later took photographs of The Beatles on August 11, 1967, again at Thompson House. The group returned to the same studio for the first stop on their July 28, 1968, photo session which later became known as the Mad Day Out.

Going further

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.