Astrid Kirchherr
Photographer who in early 1960s Hamburg played a crucial role in shaping the Beatles’ global ‘look’
ASTRID KIRCHHERR, who has died aged 81, was the young German photographer behind the early images of the Beatles that helped define them as they arrived at the threshold of stardom. With her fiancé Stuart Sutcliffe, the bass player known as the fifth Beatle, she influenced the group’s style and attitudes as they broke through from provincial obscurity to global phenomenon. The couple suggested, for example, that the foursome abandon their upswept Teddy Boy pompadours for the moptop hairstyle that was copied around the world.
When the Beatles met Astrid Kirchherr and her art student friends Klaus Voorman and Jürgen Vollmer (calling themselves Exis, short for Existentialists) in October 1960, they started seeing themselves not just as pop performers, but also as artists. She designed their clothes along cool Exi lines, with much black leather and collarless jackets that became a distinctive Beatles hallmark.
With her striking blonde, waiflike looks, it was Astrid Kirchherr, then 22, who conducted their first proper group photoshoot, capturing a gaggle of inexperienced yet oddly defiant Liverpool scruffs, some seated, others lolling, in a disused fairground in Hamburg. Her precocious visual instinct produced a set of pictures that demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of image and fashion.
It was, as one commentator noted, the moment when black-derived American music, as played by a band of unruly British teenagers, came up against Continental philosophy and avant-garde aesthetics, “a collision of art, style and raw emotion”.
“In the early days, they looked quite rough, having their hair combed back with grease, really looking like rock’n’rollers,” Astrid Kirchherr recalled. “So I thought it would suit them the most between all these wagons and steel and rust. It was early in the morning, because I only used daylight, so the poor guys had to get up very early. They only stopped playing at four o’clock in the morning, and we met at about nine or 10.
“But they were so excited to get their pictures taken that they were all standing on the corner when I drove around. They all looked neat and nice, even though they only had a few things to wear. They couldn’t wait to go with me to take the pictures.”
Of the hundreds of photographs she took during the Beatles’ formative visits to Hamburg in the early 1960s, Astrid Kirchherr’s favourite picture dated from April 1962, days after Sutcliffe died in her arms on the way to a Hamburg hospital in an ambulance. In the image, Sutcliffe’s best friend, John Lennon, sits in sombre half-light with a boyish George Harrison behind him.
“When you see John’s little face, it’s so sad,” she said. “He looks so lost sitting there, and there’s this 18-yearold boy standing behind him looking so strong. I always get the feeling George is saying: ‘Don’t worry John, I’ll be there with you’.”
Astrid Kirchherr also helped to seal the Beatles’ definitive line-up by effectively removing Sutcliffe, an indifferent musician but a brilliant abstract painter, from the group’s original configuration.
The daughter of a sales executive with the Ford Motor Company, Astrid Kirchherr was born in Hamburg on May 20 1938 and evacuated to the Baltic coast during the Second World War, during which her father, a nonnazi, drove troop supply trucks.
In the late 1950s she studied fashion design at the Meisterschule für Mode, Textil, Graphik und Werbung in Hamburg before being persuaded to switch to black-and-white photography by a tutor, Reinhard Wolf, who was impressed by her talent. On graduating in 1959, she worked for Wolf for four years.
As a student she was heavily influenced by the French Existentialists, particularly Jean-paul Sartre, and cultivated a modish Left Bank look by dressing mostly in black like her heroine Juliette Greco. Her coterie included Klaus Voorman, then her boyfriend, who had designed a cover for Walk Don’t Run by the Ventures, and who had stumbled on the Beatles in late 1960, when he wandered into the Kaiserkeller club in Hamburg’s red-light district where the group were playing. Voorman insisted that Astrid and her other friends come to see and hear them play. She was mesmerised, and having befriended them, arranged for their regular supply of Preludin (“prellies”, amphetamine-like tablets to keep them awake during their extended musical sets) from her mother’s pharmacist.
Of all the original Beatles, it was Stuart Sutcliffe who embraced Astrid’s existentialist credo with the greatest fervour. Smitten by his film-star good looks, she dumped Voorman and could hardly wait for Sutcliffe to return with the other Beatles early in 1961. When he finally arrived to undertake another three-month stint on the Reeperbahn, the couple became engaged, but Sutcliffe decided to leave the Beatles and settle in Hamburg, having been invited by Eduardo Paolozzi to study at the Hamburg College of Art, where the Scottish pop artist was visiting professor.
It was Sutcliffe, at Astrid Kirchherr’s suggestion, who steered the Beatles towards a new hairstyle, brushing his own hair forward in a way that the others soon decided to emulate. The coup de grace was administered by Jürgen Vollmer in the autumn of 1961. By the time Stuart Sutcliffe died, succumbing to a brain haemorrhage in April 1962, Astrid, for years gamine, had espoused a more androgynous look with cropped Jean Seberg-style hair, man’s shirt and trousers. This was the image she caught in her most famous self-portrait from this period, reflected in a mirror.
Meanwhile, back in Britain, the Beatles were rocketing to worldwide success, their image boosted by Astrid Kirchherr’s innovations, like the collarless jackets and the heavy chiaroscuro photographs she had pioneered in Hamburg and which were echoed in Robert Freeman’s cover shots for their second album With the Beatles (1963).
In the spring of 1963 she travelled with George Harrison, Paul Mccartney and Ringo Starr to Tenerife and photographed them in colour. A year later, having become a freelance photographer, and assisted by her colleague Max Scheler, she reverted to black-and-white stock to photograph all four Beatles for Stern magazine during the making of their first feature film A Hard Day’s Night (1964), closeted in dressing rooms and hotel suites, virtual prisoners of the Beatlemania phenomenon.
From 1967 Astrid Kirchherr abandoned her Beatles portfolio, concentrating again on photographing people within her own immediate circle, including lovers including Gibson Kemp, a Liverpool-born drummer, and Klaus Voorman.
In 1966 Voorman joined the British band Manfred Mann, having drawn the fine Aubrey Beardsley-style artwork for the cover of the Beatles’ Revolver album. Thirty years later when, with Alfons Kiefer, he designed the cover for their three-volume Anthology (1996), he incorporated a frieze surmounted by individual portraits of the foursome from Astrid Kirchherr’s 1960 fairground session in Hamburg.
Kirchherr’s role in the Beatles’ early days was tracked in the 1994 film Backbeat. By then, her photography career having foundered after she realised that people only cared about her Beatles pictures, and having taken jobs as a barmaid and as an interior designer, she was working as an assistant for a music publishing company in Hamburg.
Latterly, with her business partner Ulf Kruger, she had run a photography shop in the city, and helped to arrange Beatles conventions in the Hamburg area. Her book Yesterday: The Beatles Once Upon a Time, appeared in 2007.
As a naive young photographer, Astrid Kirchherr gave away many of her negatives to anyone who asked for them, and it was only in the 1980s that she regained ownership of her images and copyrights. In 2010 a retrospective of her work was staged in Liverpool, and the following year she auctioned some 800 negatives and prints.
She was twice married, first to Gibson Kemp, and then to a German businessman, but both marriages ended in divorce. She had no children.
‘In the early days, they looked quite rough, their hair combed back, really looking like rock’n’rollers’
Astrid Kirchherr, born May 20 1938, died May 13 2020