I This book is a personal account of The Beatles by Tom Murray, reflecting upon the time he spent photographing the band on Sunday, July 28th, 1968.
Starting out, I wanted to be a racing driver! I wanted to be an actor! And I wanted to be a photographer! I was taken to the track because at the time I was too young to drive on the road, much like Formula One driver, Max Verstappen. You can be a kid and not be allowed to drive on the high street, but at the same time you can belt around a race track with 21 of the most talented young drivers in the world! I would go to the Jim Russell Racing Driver School and drive my Lotus at the track. Unfortunately, I just didn’t have enough money to be able to drive something that went fast enough, so almost as soon as it began, my dream of becoming a racing driver was over. I didn’t think I could act. There were a lot of actors I knew, but it all seemed terribly difficult. I could sing, having sung in a choir as a lad, but then one day my voice broke. It went from angelic to something, well, less than angelic. I never sang again. Faced with no real way of becoming a professional racing driver, no experience in acting, and with a voice that had broken bad rather than good, I decided that I would concentrate on becoming a photographer. I started out with a Kodak Box Brownie, which I almost immediately managed to lose on a red double-decker number 13 bus. But eventually I got another camera, and I started to take the whole game of photography a bit more seriously. I applied to the Halstead Gazette, based in Halstead, Essex. The paper came out once a week. They told me that they didn’t have a full-time position, but if I learnt how to do the printing, they would take me on. This got me out and about taking pictures. After a year and a half the Braintree & Witham Times wrote and asked if I would like to work with Dennis Mansell, FRPS. (Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society)
Dennis was a fantastic photographer who gave me groundbreaking ideas about working in a neat and tidy way. Back then there was no real way of knowing if you had captured something on film, so Dennis taught me all the practices to make sure, more often than not, that I got what I needed. It revolutionised the way I worked and I was lucky to work with him for 18 months. Beyond that, I worked for the Essex County Standard and the Colchester Gazette, as well as the Braintree & Witham Times.
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The one thing that Dennis Mansell said to me early on, and it is perhaps the truest thing ever, was that ‘one day you will see what the camera sees’. At the time I didn’t really understand what he meant. I thought, ‘well, I am looking through it’. That’s the thing. I was looking through it. The eye edits automatically. The little bit of glass called the lens doesn’t. This was well before
the age of Photoshop, where mistakes can be erased. Nor did we have the benefit of instant results. But eventually I got so good at knowing what I had taken that I could tell my assistant which numbers on the roll would be the best photographs before the rolls were even processed.
My secret behind the lens, when engaging a subject, is to drivel on at them until they give up ‘pretending’ and then the ‘real them’ eventually comes forward.
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Some people were going out on the town in Levi’s and cowboy boots, while others turned up in top hats and tails. 018
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I worked at The Sunday Times’ studio for four and a half years before getting my own studio. I lived just up the road from Paul in St John’s Wood, near the Abbey Road studios and I’d often see Paul simply out and about. It was cool but it wasn’t like it would be now. If you went to Michael Caine’s Langan’s Brasserie or San Lorenzo, where I used to go with Lord Snowdon, you would sometimes see either Paul or John sitting around. The great thing about the San Lorenzo restaurant was that it had this huge glass roof that used to open and then get stuck. Inevitably it would then piss down with rain and the staff would run around tables frantically handing out umbrellas.
Typically British really.
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094 ‘The Docks’ by Tom Murray 1968
The amazing thing about the photos I made is that as technology moves forward they can be realised as they were in my head, and through my eyes back then. I do still use film now though, because I prefer the results over digital. I am a bit of a luddite, but I know that more can be pulled out of these pictures digitally than I was able to do in a darkroom, so I am confident that the way the pictures look in this book is how I remember them on the day I took them.
Eve Arnold
In the early 1980s, Eve Arnold, one of America’s most famous photographers, told me:
‘Darling, keep the best, dump the rest, and keep those you select for your old-age pension.’ Which is why we are doing this lovely book now
I am in my early 70s.
going on
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21!
Nobody really saw what I had done until I had my own studio and was photographing the great and good from all over the world.
I just put the images I chose from that day in a drawer. For the image of John lying on the ground, I only shot two frames. The one with his eyes open and the other with them closed. Another of George was simply as I caught it at that moment. It wasn’t even set up. I had no script, I wasn’t photographing for anyone, and they are still in the same cardboard mounts from the Morgan and Swan colour lab that they were in when they were processed. So, they just sat there in that drawer for many years. It was only when I photographed Princess Margaret’s family the year after that the press clocked on to the fact that I had been the youngest Beatles photographer. But nobody really saw what I had done until I had my own studio and was photographing the great and good from all over the world. Life just rolls that way. It was only after I auctioned one of the prints in California that I realised how much interest there was in this set of photographs. They have helped me raise a lot of money for charity. Overall, with quite a bit of help I have raised just over £8.5 million / $12.5 million and (£1.3 million + pounds personally) from auctioning images from my career, and The Beatles images have played quite a big part in that. It’s my way of giving something back for the opportunities I’ve been afforded. I can’t run marathons, sit in baths of beans or do anything like that. Donating prints has always been my way of doing the right thing for good causes. Over the years, Paul and Ringo have signed prints for a number of charities. The boys have never stopped caring, or forgotten what their legacy means to so many people. Incidentally, Thomas Hoving, Director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, one of the largest art museums in the world, testified in court on behalf of John Lennon to keep him from being deported for marijuana possession in New York City. The Caron Foundation raised a lot of money for charity by giving the head of MTV, Tom Freston, one of my prints in a Tiffany frame. Thomas’s nephew John Hoving organised that event at the Hammerstein Ballroom, NYC. I donated a full set of Beatles photographs to be auctioned to help raise money for the foundation, which helps people with serious drug issues. As for Make-A-Wish, over 10 years I made the highest amounts at auction, raising over £250,000 with my prints going for between £10-35,000 pounds a time.
Even in my retirement, although it costs me a lot more do do, the photographs I took of them deserve the care and attention of top grade printing. Right now I support more than 32 charities worldwide.
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wa t a h t s ll o r t s u j Life
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