Astrid Kirchherr, photographer of the Beatles, dies

New York — Astrid Kirchherr, the German photographer who shot some of the earliest and most striking images of the Beatles and had a lasting impact on their visual style, has died at age 81.

She died Wednesday in her native Hamburg, days before her 82nd birthday. Her death was first announced by Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn, who tweeted Friday that Kirchherr made an “immeasurable” contribution to the group and was “intelligent, inspirational, innovative, daring, artistic, awake, aware, beautiful, smart, loving and uplifting.” According to the German publication Die Zeit, she died of a “short, serious illness.”

Kirchherr was a photographer’s assistant in Hamburg and part of the local art scene in 1960 when her then-boyfriend Klaus Voormann dropped in at a seedy club, the Kaiserkeller, and found himself mesmerized by a young British rock group. The five raw musicians from Liverpool had recently named themselves the Beatles.

As she later recalled, Voormann then spent the next few days convincing Kirchherr to join him, a decision which profoundly changed her.

“It was like a merry-goround in my head, they looked absolutely astonishing,” Kirchherr later told Beatles biographer Bob Spitz. “My whole life changed in a couple of minutes. All I wanted was to be with them and to know them.”

Kirchherr had dreamed of photographing “charismatic” men and found her ideal subjects in the Beatles, especially their bassist at the time, Stuart Sutcliffe, a gifted painter. They quickly fell in love, even though she spoke little English and he knew little German.

“Stuart was a very special person and he was miles ahead of everybody,” she told NPR in 2010. “You know as far as intelligent and artistic feelings are concerned, he was miles ahead. So I learned a lot from him and because in the ’60s we had a very strange attitude towards being young, towards sex, towards everything.”

Sutcliffe collapsed and died of a cerebral hemorrhage in April 1962, at age 21. Kirchherr later married twice, including to the British drummer Gibson Kemp. Both marriages ended in divorce, and she would long say that she never got over Sutcliffe’s death.