Took some of rock’s most iconic photos

Fiona Adams, a photographer who captured a memorable image of the Beatles just as the band was gaining worldwide fame, died June 26 on the British island of Guernsey. She was 84. The cause was not disclosed.

Adams worked for a portrait photographer and then a government agency, taking pictures of buildings throughout London. She then spent two years in Australia, where she had a brief marriage. Little is known of her first husband, except that she took his name.

She returned in 1962 to a London that seemed transformed.

“I was walking around in a different world from the one I’d left,” she later said. “Here I was in an exciting new environment with new, fun clothes and a new music scene.”

By 1963, she was working for Boyfriend magazine, which catered to teenage girls.

“I just sat down next to (the Beatles) and said I was from Boyfriend magazine and would they mind coming up to the studio for a shoot the following week, and they said fine,” she told Culturevoyage in 2008. “It was as casual as that in those days.”

Adams scouted locations by riding around London on buses. For the Beatles, she found a bombed-out building from the Second World World War that offered interesting angles.

She lugged her equipment down into the crater as the four cavorted above her.

“The boys stood patiently — beautifully silhouetted against the sky and the buildings,” she recalled in the Guardian. “I set up my camera and shouted: ‘One, two, three — jump!’ ”

That memorable image embodied the group’s iconoclasm and insouciance. When it was displayed 40 years later at London’s National Portrait Gallery, curator Terence Pepper called it “one of the defining images of 20th-century culture.”

During the next four years, Adams shot more than 300 portraits of the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Dusty Springfield, Bob Dylan and the Hollies.

She photographed Jimi Hendrix before he became famous. She was one of Britain’s most acclaimed rock photographers, but at the end of 1967, Adams stepped away.

“The bands were becoming distant and drugs were taking their toll,” she said.

“I was a very hard taskmaster to myself and it was becoming impossible to make things look different.”

She then shot advertising brochures, and opened a studio on Guernsey.

Fiona Rose Pattinson Clarke was born Sept. 26, 1935, on Guernsey.

From 1972, when she married Owen Le Tissier, a globe-trotting engineer, Adams shot scenic landscapes around the world.

Her husband died in 2011. Survivors include two children and a grandson.