Icon to icon
A new book charts three decades in the life of Paul McCartney by the extremely well-respected portrait pro Harry Benson. Amy Davies spoke to the photographer
An icon of British photography, Harry Benson has captured the lives of countless celebrities and politicians, over a multi-decade-spanning career. He’s been published in just about every important journal out there, and spent many years working for the seminal American publication, Life. Among countless awards and accolades, he received AP’s Exceptional Achievement in Photography Award in 2018, yet he impressively shows no signs of stopping just yet.
As such, his latest book, Paul, charts a few decades of another British icon’s life. It follows Paul McCartney from the early days of The Beatles’ mega-success, through to his later career with the group
Wings, alongside more personal images of him at home with his wife Linda and their children.
To find out more about the project – among other things – I chatted to Scottish-born Harry from his home in Manhattan, where he has lived for over 50 years.
It’s clear from looking at these shots, and indeed looking at much of the work from Harry’s extensive back-catalogue, that he prefers the natural approach, rather than the overly stylised or posed – but he’s been fortunate that many of his subjects seemed to be naturally adept. ‘You have to give them some
basic instruction, because you’ve got to get them looking in your direction. But, you’re dealing with intelligent people and they know what to do. People like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, they knew where their head should be. You’d get a very good picture by letting them just go with it, and not controlling it,’ he explains.
That sense of movement is what Harry looked out for, and is what leaves the resulting images with a sense of fluidity, fun and vitality. He favoured small and light 35mm cameras, most of the time, to enable him to be quick and light on his feet, moving from potential scene to potential scene. ‘When you’ve got movement, you’ve got a picture you will look at because of the movement in the picture. When you start slowing it down, it could turn into slow motion with no life in it,’ argues Harry.
It has been well-documented how the assignment to shoot The Beatles right at the very beginning of their career was a life-changing opportunity for Harry that would alter the course of his work from that moment on. Anyone familiar with Harry’s story will already know that he was actually due to be flying elsewhere when he got the call to follow The Beatles to Paris. At the time, he wasn’t happy, preferring to think of himself as a serious photojournalist, unconcerned with the trivialities of an up-and-coming young pop group.
What followed was a severaldecades-long association with Paul – who Harry realised was essential to any photo of the group. As he says in the introduction to the book, ‘A picture of The Beatles without Paul was not a picture of The Beatles. He was the magnet.’ The first photo session took place in 1964, just as the group were on the cusp
of global superstardom. ‘You had a feeling that this was a phenomenon,’ Harry tells me. ‘The music was so good, I think I was very fortunate to be there right at the very beginning.’
Harry’s approach to most shoots is to start afresh, avoiding becoming too pally even with those he has met and worked with on numerous occasions. ‘It can be a mistake becoming friendly with your subject – or your victim, as I like to call them,’ he jokes. ‘You’ve got to handle yourself professionally. It is a business, and you want the best pictures. You want them to try for it, and the less chit-chat you do, the better off you are. You don’t get the best if you want to talk about football or something. I want to concentrate on being able to hear the music in the pictures.’
Indeed, Harry worries less about what the subject is doing, and more about the capabilities of the ‘stupid person taking the photograph’. He says, ‘I know this sounds a bit simple, but a smile on people is very important – it takes away an awful lot of rough edges. It’s hard to dislike somebody who is amiable, and who is decent. When people start to pose and are worried about how the last
photographer who captured them was a disaster, then that’s when it goes wrong. I want them to know that it wasn’t a disaster with me and they should just let go and be who they are. If it doesn’t work out fine, that usually comes from the photographer, not the subject.’
Tri and Tri again
Along with the usual dedications you might expect to see in the back of a book, Harry thanks something else in Paul which he credits his career to: Kodak Tri-X film. ‘Tri-X was an all rounder,’ he explains. ‘If you wanted to be safe, this was it. You’d ask people, do you want it in black & white – usually they’d say yes, and that means Tri-X. With it, you’d know that even if you’d done the worst exposure, you’re still going to get a good picture because of it being such a good film to use. The detail in it is terrific – I’ve been using it for about 100 years, you wouldn’t feel safe without it.’
Most of the images in Paul are indeed shot in black & white, but a few colour images do make an appearance, something which took some getting used to in the early days. ‘There was a phoniness about colour,’ says Harry. ‘Certainly at the beginning, because you had to be careful with it, and even if you were careful, the colour wouldn’t always be perfect.’
Now aged 91, Harry has had a long and illustrious career – and is still working now. Considering himself incredibly lucky to have made a career out of his passion, as we often find to be the case, Harry was a reader of this very magazine all the way back when he was just five years old. ‘My father would get Amateur Photographer, so I started to look at it too. I remember there was a writer called Lancelot Vining who I always used to read – he did a piece called My Way with a Miniature. He wrote about photography in a way that I found exciting, like going to a circus or a football match – he was terrific. He basically said you could take a camera anywhere, and I followed that advice.’
Paul is just the latest in a long line of books from Harry’s back catalogue. In this particular case, I find myself curious to know if the eponymous subject had any input or feedback. I can almost see the cheeky glint in Harry’s eye as I ask the question as to whether McCartney has seen the finished book. ‘He might have,’ he says. ‘I don’t know – and I don’t care. I never did it for Paul. I said to him about a year ago that I’d like to do a book on him, and he didn’t say anything. Which is exactly what I wanted – he just looked at me and smiled. I didn’t want him to say “yes”, because if he had, it would have meant he would want some element of control too.
‘Then, I’d have a problem, especially if he started saying – I like this photograph, I don’t like this one. I don’t like the person in this photo, or even I don’t like the piano in this shot. That’s the way it has gone with people – I’ve never gone in with a celebrity on a book, but of the photographers I know who have, they’ve all mentioned the problems it can lead to.’
That’s not to say Harry doesn’t seek advice. He listens carefully to those around him, including his wife and daughter, plus the professional editors involved with sequencing the book. He expects the reaction to be positive from the intended audience, too. He jokes, ‘I think readers will immediately think it’s a masterpiece – the best book they’ve ever seen perhaps. No – I think it’s good and it shows somebody having a wonderful life and being a rock star.’