Robert Freeman
1936 - 2019
With His Most Famous Photo
The newspaper today brings the news of the death of British photographer Robert Freeman at the age of 82.
Fate struck Mr. Freeman in August 1963 when George Martin and Brian Epstein called upon him to see if he would do a photo shoot for an album cover for an up-and-coming rock and roll band, The Beatles. With no make up artists or hair stylists present, the four Beatles showed up in a hotel dining room in Bournemouth. They were wearing black turtleneck sweaters. Freeman positioned them against a dark background, had Ringo Starr slouch down in the right front and took the black and white photo of the four unsmiling half-in-the-shadows faces that, essentially, introduced The Beatles to, if not the world, then certainly to the United States.
The album With The Beatles was renamed Meet The Beatles for the US market, and the rest, as they say, was history. What I learned in reading the obit today was that the photo on the album was one group photo of all four Beatles. I had always assumed that they were four individual photos that were patched together to make the iconic album cover.
Freeman became a kind of quasi-official photographer to The Beatles. In addition to the Meet The Beatles picture, he photographed the album covers for Help, Beatles For Sale, and Rubber Soul.
He also took the photos that were used over the end credits for the movies "A Hard Days Night" and "Help."
Prior to all of this, Freeman was known as a portrait photographer. He photographed Nikita Khrushchev in his Kremlin office, and took photos of many famous jazz artists as they performed in Great Britain. It was these photos that brought him to the attention of Epstein.
RIP Robert Freeman.
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