The Beatles: Photo exhibition on Sir Paul McCartney comes to the de Young Museum in San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — Sixty years ago, the Beatles came to the Bay Area to launch their first U.S. concert tour, and memories of the Fab Four performing to a packed crowd at San Francisco’s Cow Palace in August 1964 are still the stuff dreams and screams are made of.

And although it’s a long way from the stage of the Cow Palace to the de Young Museum in San Francisco, curator Sally Martin Katz hopes the same enthusiasm will be felt in an upcoming photography exhibition: Beatlemania as seen by Sir Paul McCartney.

“So this exhibition covers this intense three-month period, from December 1963 to February 1964. And so we now have the rare opportunity to see the story through McCartney’s eyes, from her experience,” explains Katz.

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The exhibition is called “Eyes of the Storm.” It shows snapshots that McCartney took with his 35mm camera and just pulled out of his private collection. The photos document the madness in the year before the concert in San Francisco.

“I like the title of the exhibition, Eyes of the Storm, which really captures this idea. I mean the storm of Beatlemania that came here in the US, how it took the country by storm, but also this idea of ​​looking, of being eyes and who is looking at who and the direction of the gaze is how we are used to being the ones looking at them, and here he is returning the gaze, looking at the fans, looking at the journalists,” says Katz.

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And McCartney turns his lens on both journalists and his fellow Beatles, giving audiences an unfiltered look at the innocent joy and relentless pressure of their sudden fame.

“The photos are in motion. They are blurred. We see a kind of movement. And so, as I said, they are not carefully posed images where he thinks about the composition from a very conscious perspective. But I think they have great value as works of art in themselves, not just as documents of a moment,” believes Katz.

The photos were exhibited in New York and will be on display at the de Young just before spring. The exhibition runs from March 1 to early July. And perhaps it will rekindle the excitement that swept the Bay Area so many decades ago.