The stark black-and-white photographs she took of the group in Hamburg, Germany, before the musicians were famous captured both their toughness and their sensitivity.
By
Astrid
Kirchherr, the German photographer whose portraits of the Beatles when
the musicians were a scruffy British bar band playing in Hamburg’s
red-light district captured not only their toughness but also the
sensitivity beneath their leather-clad exteriors, died on Tuesday in
Hamburg, Germany. She was 81.
The
cause was cancer, said Chris Murray, who presented Ms. Kirchherr’s
first American exhibition at the Govinda Gallery in Washington in 1994.
Ms.
Kirchherr was a 22-year-old art and photography student when she met
the Beatles in October 1960. The group — then a quintet, with John
Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison playing guitars; Stuart
Sutcliffe on bass; and Pete Best on drums — had been in Hamburg since
August and was working at the Kaiserkeller, a club frequented by sailors
and by prostitutes looking for customers.
Ms. Kirchherr discovered the Beatles through her boyfriend at the time, Klaus Voormann,
a fellow art student. After a quarrel, Mr. Voormann left her house;
walking past the Kaiserkeller, he was drawn to the Beatles’ high-energy
sound.
He
returned to tell Ms. Kirchherr about the band. The next evening, she
and Jürgen Vollmer, another young artist, went to the Kaiserkeller with
Mr. Voormann.
The
three artists soon became friendly with the Beatles, who found them
exotic; influenced by French rather than German culture and style, they
typically dressed in black and adopted a serious, sometimes gloomy
demeanor.
Ms.
Kirchherr was immediately attracted to Mr. Sutcliffe, and after she had
spent two days photographing him, the two declared that they were in
love. Mr. Voormann quickly stepped aside, saying that his romance with
Ms. Kirchherr had run its course. By mid-November, Mr. Sutcliffe and Ms.
Kirchherr were engaged.
Ms.
Kirchherr had by then also photographed the rest of the band members.
Collecting the musicians and their instruments in her Volkswagen, Ms.
Kirchherr brought them to a fairground, where she shot both individual
and group portraits in stark black and white. One group photo in
particular, showing the band standing with their instruments before an
open-sided truck with a roller coaster behind them, has become what the
Beatles historian and biographer Mark Lewisohn called “the definitive
image of the group before they attained fame.”
Credit...Astrid Kirchherr, via Govinda Gallery
“It was early in the morning, because I only used daylight,” Ms. Kirchherr told The Age,
a newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, in 2005. “So the poor guys had to
get up very early. They only stopped playing at four o’clock in the
morning, and we met about nine or 10.”
“They
looked quite rough, having their hair combed back with grease, really
looking like rock ’n’ rollers,” she continued, “so I thought it would
suit them the most between all these wagons and steel and rust.”
Mr.
Sutcliffe, Mr. Lennon’s best friend from art school, was a gifted
painter but an indifferent musician; he joined the Beatles after winning
a cash prize in a Liverpool art contest and allowing Mr. Lennon to
persuade him to buy an electric bass. But even before he met Ms.
Kirchherr, he had decided to leave the group and to return to his art
studies. Once he decided to remain in Germany with Ms. Kirchherr, he
enrolled at the Hamburg College of Art as a student of Eduardo Paolozzi.
He
continued to play with the Beatles in Hamburg, though, and through him
Ms. Kirchherr influenced the group’s style. When Mr. Sutcliffe adopted
her short, brushed-forward hairstyle, the other Beatles first mocked
him, preferring to maintain the greased-back Elvis Presley style. But
Mr. Harrison soon adopted the new haircut as well. Both Mr. Lennon and
Mr. McCartney followed suit in October 1961. Mr. Sutcliffe also began
wearing Ms. Kirchherr’s clothing, including collarless jackets she had
made, patterned after those of the French designer Pierre Cardin. The
Beatles briefly adopted that style as well.
Mr.
Sutcliffe moved into Ms. Kirchherr’s home and continued his studies,
but he was plagued by headaches and mood swings. On April 10, 1962, he
collapsed while painting; he died of a brain hemorrhage in an ambulance,
in her arms. The Beatles arrived from Liverpool, England, for another
Hamburg club residency the next day.
The couple’s story, and that of the Beatles in those days, is told in the 1994 movie “Backbeat,” in which Ms. Kirchherr is played by Sheryl Lee.
Astrid
Kirchherr was born in Hamburg on May 20, 1938, the only child of Emil
Kirchherr, a salesman for the German arm of the Ford Motor Company, and
Nielsa Bergmann Kirchherr, a homemaker whose inheritance from her
father’s jukebox manufacturing company made her independently wealthy.
She studied art at a school in Hamburg and photography with Reinhart Wolf, who hired her as an assistant shortly before she met the Beatles.
After
Mr. Sutcliffe’s death, Ms. Kirchherr maintained her friendship with the
Beatles, photographing the group on the set of “A Hard Day’s Night” in
1964 and taking a portrait of Mr. Harrison in 1968. But she largely set
aside photography in the mid-1960s, working instead as an interior
designer.
She
married Gibson Kemp, a British drummer, in 1967, and helped him run
Kemp’s English Pub in Hamburg, where she lived her entire life. Their
marriage ended in divorce in 1974; a second marriage, to a German
businessman, also ended in divorce. She has no surviving immediate
family members.
For
many years Ms. Kirchherr made little money from her Beatles
photographs, although they were reproduced frequently. That changed in
the 1980s, when she began making regular appearances at Beatles
conventions, selling and signing prints. In 1988, she and Ulf Krüger, a
German musician, started K & K, a Hamburg shop that sold vintage
photography and books.
Genesis Publications,
a British limited-edition imprint, published five books of her work:
“Liverpool Days” (1994) and “Golden Dreams” (1996), both collaborations
with Max Scheler; “Beatles in Germany” (1997), which also included the
work of several other photographers; “Hamburg Days” (1999), a
collaboration with Mr. Voormann; and “When We Was Fab” (2007). She also
published several trade books, among them “Yesterday: The Beatles Once
Upon a Time” (2008) and “Astrid Kirchherr: A Retrospective” (2010).
In 2011, she sold the rights to her work to a private collector and announced her retirement.
“I’m
a very, very silly girl,” Ms. Kirchherr said in 2005, speaking about
her lack of business acumen in dealing with her Beatles photographs. “I
just had the joy of taking pictures, and I never cared about my
negatives. I just gave them away whenever anybody asked for t
hem. I never cared about the money so much, because it was such a joy meeting them and becoming very close friends with them.”
“They
gave me so much in return, as far as love and affection was concerned,”
she said. “They always cared about me and looked after me.”
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