Paul McCartney Announces New Photo Book 1964: Eyes of the Storm

Paul McCartney is releasing a photography book compiling 275 of his snapshots taken between the end of 1963 and the beginning of 1964—when Beatlemania was becoming a global phenomenon. 1964: Eyes of the Storm will be published June 13 by Liveright. The 35mm images are McCartney’s personal record of the time and capture the Beatles’ travels through Liverpool, London, Paris, New York, Washington, D.C., and Miami. Watch a trailer for the book below.

1964: Eyes of the Storm includes several never-before-seen portraits of John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, as well as a foreword by McCartney, an introduction by Harvard historian and New Yorker essayist Jill Lepore, a preface by Nicholas Cullinan (director of the National Portrait Gallery, London), and an essay by senior curator Rosie Broadley. The process of creating the book began in 2020, when a trove of nearly 1,000 of McCartney’s photographs were rediscovered in his archive.

“Anyone who rediscovers a personal relic or family treasure is instantly flooded with memories and emotions, which then trigger associations buried in the haze of time,” McCartney wrote in press materials. “This was exactly my experience in seeing these photos, all taken over an intense three-month period of travel, culminating in February 1964.” He continued:

It was a wonderful sensation to be plunged right back. Here was my own record of our first huge trip, a photographic journal of The Beatles in six cities, beginning in Liverpool and London, followed by Paris (where John and I had been ordinary hitchhikers three years before), and then what we regarded as the big time, our first visit as a group to America.