The artist who captured the Beatles before they were famous
The German artist Astrid Kirchherr, who has died aged 81, befriended The Beatles in Hamburg in the early 1960s, and took the defining photographs of the band as they stood on the threshold of stardom. Having fallen in love with Stuart Sutcliffe – the bass player sometimes referred to as the Fifth Beatle – she also did much to shape The Beatles’ image: she encouraged them to dress in black leather on stage, and – more lastingly – to abandon their greased, upswept Teddy Boy hairstyles, and brush their hair forwards into what became known as the mop top.
Astrid Kirchherr was born in Hamburg in
1938, to a German father and a Swedish mother. She was evacuated to the Baltic during the War, and after it enrolled in a fashion college in Hamburg, before turning to photography. Rejecting Germany’s recent past, she and her friends took inspiration from Parisian existentialists – they were known as the Exies. Waif-like and androgynous, with a striking blonde crop, she was 22 when she first clapped eyes on The Beatles, playing in a bar in Hamburg’s red light district in October 1960. She had gone to the Kaiserkeller with her boyfriend Klaus Voormann and fellow artist Jürgen Vollmer, said The New York Times. The Beatles were intrigued by the trio, with their studied, modernist cool, while Kirchherr was struck by the beauty of the young rockers, and immediately wanted to photograph them.
She was most closely drawn to Sutcliffe, and the pair became lovers within days. Around the same time, she persuaded the band to come with her to a nearby fairground. She had them pose with their guitars among the machinery, and photographed them in stark monochrome. Soon after, Sutcliffe washed the Brylcreem out of his hair, and she cut it into a style she had given her ex, to cover his ears. The other Beatles teased him, but they all followed
Day’s Night
suit. “They were all so young, and I was so different,” she said later, of their friendship. “I was a few years older, I had my own flat, my own car, my own career. They hadn’t met anyone like me before. In some ways I was more like a mother figure.”
Sutcliffe had the moody good looks of a rock star, but he was an indifferent musician: a talented painter, he had only joined the band after being persuaded by his friend John Lennon to buy an electric guitar with the money he had made from an art prize. He’d decided to return to his first love of art before he met Kirchherr, and when the Beatles went back to England, he stayed in Hamburg, where he won a scholarship to the College of Art. He and Kirchherr were by then engaged, and living together. But he was plagued by headaches, and on 10 April 1962, he collapsed while painting. He died in her arms on the way to hospital, of a brain haemorrhage, aged 21. Two days later, when the Beatles returned to Hamburg for another residency, it was Kirchherr who broke the news.
Her friendship with the band survived Sutcliffe’s death: she took more photos of them in Hamburg, and then on the set of
in 1964. But in the mid-1960s, she turned to interior design. For years, she didn’t capitalise on her photographs, and only started to try to assert her copyright in the 1980s. She had, she said, been naive. “I just had the joy of taking pictures, and I never cared about my negatives. I just gave them away whenever anybody asked for them. I never cared about the money so much, because it was such a joy meeting [the Beatles] and becoming very close friends with them.” She was divorced twice, and had no children. In 2008, she said that none of her later relationships had matched the one she’d had with Sutcliffe. “When I saw him for the first time, I knew that was my man. He was and still is the love of my life, even though he’s gone for such a long time.”
A Hard