Beatles photographer Astrid Kirchherr dies aged 81
Obituary by
Spencer Leigh
Sean
O’Hagan
Tue 19 May
2020 08.29 BSTLast modified on Tue 19 May 2020 09.21 BST
As the
various obituaries that marked her passing testify, Astrid Kirchherr’s fate was
to be forever associated with the Beatles, a group she met almost by accident
and whose image she remade so audaciously.
It was Kirchherr’s
boyfriend, Klaus Voormann, who insisted that she and their friend, Jürgen
Vollmer, came with him to the spectacularly seedy Kaiserkeller in Hamburg’s
red-light district on an October evening in 1960. The previous night Voormann,
a jazz fan who had never attended a rock’n’roll gig before, had been mesmerised
by the Beatles’ raw on-stage energy as they performed to a motley crew of
drunks, sailors and prostitutes. Kirchherr, though, immediately saw something
else in them. “I was amazed at how beautiful they looked,” she said, later. “It
was a photographer’s dream, my dream.”
Kirchherr
had just completed a photography course at the College of Design and Fashion in
Hamburg, where her tutor had been Reinhart Wolf, who would later become an
acclaimed photographer of architectural facades. On graduating, she worked as
his assistant for a further three years, but her abiding interest was the
architecture of the human face.
As a
photographer, Kirchherr was a quietly confident woman in a predominantly male
world. A modernist at heart, she shot her subjects in stark monochrome,
insisting that serious photography was essentially a black and white medium.
“She always worked with a tripod,” Voormann recalled years later, “and always
positioned the people, giving them directions.”
That meticulous
approach is evident in her famous early portrait of the Beatles in an empty,
neglected Hamburg funfair, which was made just days after she first met them.
The Beatles were living a hand-to-mouth life at the time, playing several sets
a night, drinking hard and sharing dingy rooms in an unsavoury neighbourhood.
She thought the “slight grubbiness” of the location suited the way they looked.
She was correct.
Lined up
against a dilapidated fairground structure, they look like a bunch of street
toughs with guitars. Their studied insouciance is undercut by their stern
gazes, which are directed at the camera or off into the distance. On that early
shoot, working without an assistant, she instructed them how to look and where
to look, despite having only a rudimentary grasp of English. She later said, “I
took their heads in my hands and arranged them as I wanted them.”
In her
early photographs of the group, it is Stuart Sutcliffe, who looks the coolest
and the most mysterious, his black clothes, upright quiff and shades a timeless
style that echoes through punk, post-punk and beyond. (Lennon instinctively
understood his friend’s star quality, insisting in the face of the other’s
complaints that he remain in the group despite his rudimentary musical skills:
“It doesn’t matter, he looks good.”)
Lennon
dubbed Kirchherr and her friends “the exies” – scouse shorthand for existentialists
– and may have initially been slightly threatened by their studied cool,
sophistication and style. Sutcliffe had no such reservations, connecting with
the young Germans immediately and referring to them as “real bohemians”.
It was with
Sutcliffe, the artiest Beatle, that Kirchherr connected most deeply: the two
soon became lovers and moved into a loft space in her mother’s house. She
undoubtedly shifted his perspective away from pop music and back to art. To
Lennon’s consternation, he soon left the group to concentrate on his first
love, painting. Before that, though, he was her template for all that followed
in terms of the Beatles’ change of image. She styled him to a degree in her own
mould: the bobbed hair, the more tailored leather jackets, the black polo
necks. It was a radical shift away from the influence of recent pop past –
1950s rock’n’roll – to the modernist present: French New Wave cinema, art
school bohemianism, a hint of androgyny.
Sutcliffe
was the first Beatle to change his hairstyle having seen and been impressed by
Voormann’s longer tresses, which had been sculpted by Kirchherr to help conceal
his prominent ears. Harrison soon followed suit. Intriguingly, Lennon and
McCartney were the most reluctant to give up their quiffs. On a visit to Paris,
they were finally convinced by Vollmer, who was then working as an assistant to
the American photographer, William Klein – which gives us some idea of the
circles these young German bohos were moving in.
In applying
her bobbed-hairstyle, borrowed from Juliet Gréco, to the working class lads
from Liverpool, Kirchherr feminised them in a way, softening their street-tough
image. It was a bold move that announced the impending pop future, the group’s
longer hair later becoming an obsession to the mainstream media, who christened
them, not altogether flatteringly “the Mop-tops.”
Much deeper
cultural shifts were under way, though, and the Beatles came to represent a
wave of meritocratic creativity in music, art, film and photography that, for a
brief moment, made the mid-60s seem genuinely utopian. As pop historian Jon
Savage has noted, the Beatles, in their irreverent attitude and modernist style
almost as much as their early music, signalled “the end of the Victorian age”
in Britain. Ironically, it was a young German woman with an emphatically
European aesthetic who shaped their image.
Kirchherr’s
relationship with Sutcliffe was intense and short-lived. Soon after they began
living together, he began attending art school in Hamburg and painted with a
renewed energy despite being dogged by debilitating headaches. It is hard now
to grasp how tumultuous his sudden death, aged 21, was for her at a time that
promised so much.
Lennon,
too, was devastated at the loss of his close friend. When he and Harrison
visited the loft studio, he asked Kirchherr to photograph him standing in the
same spot that Sutcliffe had stood in for a previous portrait by her. There is
a palpable sadness that emanates from her image of a shell-shocked Lennon
standing in the ghostly half-light, but she much preferred another portrait she
made in the same session. In it, John is sitting in a chair and George is
standing behind him, his hand resting on his friend’s shoulder. “Every time I
see that photo, I see the immense sadness in John’s face and the strength in
George,” she later said.
As time has
gone by, it is other less well-known portraits by Kirchherr that seem more
striking, including an almost deadpan self-portrait, in which she stares
straight ahead, holding the camera’s shutter release, beneath thin branches
that hang down from somewhere above her head. Writer and art critic Michael
Bracewell has pointed out that her androgynous look and cerebral approach
harked back to “the young German modernists of 1929”, while a later snapshot of
her then husband, George Kemp, at the Star Club in Hamburg, could be mistaken
for “a photograph of Nico and Sterling Morrison” hanging out at Andy Warhol’s
Factory.
In many
ways, the young Kirchherr was an outlier, a stylish bohemian who understood the
ways in which art could impact on popular culture, and vice versa. In a dingy,
disreputable Hamburg bar, amid the noise and the squalor, she detected
something beautiful. She was in the right place at exactly the right time. And
so, more to the point, were they.
Astrid
Kirchherr (20 May 1938 – 12 May 2020) was a German photographer and artist
known for her association with the Beatles (along with her friends Klaus
Voormann and Jürgen Vollmer) and her photographs of the band's original members
– John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best
– during their early days in Hamburg.
Kirchherr
met artist Stuart Sutcliffe in the Kaiserkeller bar in Hamburg in 1960, where
Sutcliffe was playing bass with the Beatles, and was later engaged to him,
before his death in 1962. Although Kirchherr shot very few photographs after
1967, her early work has been exhibited in Hamburg, Bremen, London, Liverpool,
New York City, Washington, D.C., Tokyo, Vienna and at the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of
Fame. She published three limited-edition books of photographs.
Kirchherr
was born in 1938 in Hamburg, Germany, and was the daughter of a former
executive of the German branch of the Ford Motor Company. During World War II,
she was evacuated to the safety of the Baltic Sea where she remembered seeing
dead bodies on the shore (after the ships Cap Arcona and the SS Deutschland had
been bombed and sunk) and the destruction in Hamburg when she returned.
After her
graduation, Kirchherr enrolled in the Meisterschule für Mode, Textil, Grafik
und Werbung in Hamburg, as she wanted to study fashion design but demonstrated
a talent for black-and-white photography. Reinhard Wolf, the school's main
photographic tutor, convinced her to switch courses and promised that he would
hire her as his assistant when she graduated.[1] Kirchherr worked for Wolf as
his assistant from 1959 until 1963.
In the late
1950s and early 1960s, Kirchherr and her art school friends were involved in
the European existentialist movement whose followers were later nicknamed
"Exis" by Lennon. In 1995, she told BBC Radio Merseyside:
"Our philosophy then, because we were only little kids, was wearing black
clothes and going around looking moody. Of course, we had a clue who Jean-Paul
Sartre was.We got inspired by all the French artists and writers, because
that was the closest we could get. England was so far away, and America was out
of the question. So France was the nearest. So we got all the information from
France, and we tried to dress like the French existentialists... We wanted to
be free, we wanted to be different, and tried to be cool, as we call it now.”
The Beatles
Kirchherr,
Voormann and Vollmer were friends who had all attended the Meisterschule, and
shared the same ideas about fashion, culture and music. Voormann became
Astrid's boyfriend, and moved into the Kirchherr home, where he had his own
room.In 1960, after Kirchherr and Vollmer had had an argument with Voormann, he
wandered down the Reeperbahn (in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg) and heard
music coming from the Kaiserkeller club. Voormann walked in and watched a
performance by a group called the Beatles: Lennon, McCartney, Harrison,
Sutcliffe and Best, their drummer at the time. Voormann asked Kirchherr and
Vollmer to listen to this new music, and after being persuaded to visit the
Kaiserkeller (which was in the rough area of the Reeperbahn),Kirchherr decided
that all she wanted to do was to be as close to the Beatles as she could. The
trio of friends had never heard rock n' roll before, having previously listened
to only trad jazz, with some Nat King Cole and The Platters mixed in. The trio
then visited the Kaiserkeller almost every night, arriving at 9 o'clock and
sitting by the front of the stage. Kirchherr later said: "It was like a
merry-go-round in my head, they looked absolutely astonishing... My whole life
changed in a couple of minutes. All I wanted was to be with them and to know
them."
Kirchherr
later said that she, Voormann and Vollmer felt guilty about being German, and
about Germany's recent history. Meeting the Beatles was something very special
for her, although she knew that English people would think that she ate
sauerkraut, and would comment on her heavy German accent, but they made jokes
about it together. Lennon would make sarcastic remarks from the stage, saying
"You Krauts, we won the war", knowing that very few Germans in the
audience spoke English, but any English sailors present would roar with
laughter.
Sutcliffe
was fascinated by the trio, but especially Kirchherr, and thought they looked
like "real bohemians". Bill Harry later said that when Kirchherr
walked in, every head would immediately turn her way, and that she always
captivated the whole room. Sutcliffe wrote to a friend that he could hardly
take his eyes off her and had tried to talk to Kirchherr during the next break,
but she had already left the club. Sutcliffe managed to meet them eventually,
and learned that all three had attended the Meisterschule, which was the same
type of art college that Lennon and Sutcliffe had attended in Liverpool (Note:
Meisterschule für Mode, Textil, Grafik und Werbung [Master Craftspeople College
for Fashion, Textile, Graphics, and Advertising], although it is now called the
University of Applied Sciences).
Photographs
Kirchherr
asked the Beatles if they would mind letting her take photographs of them in a
photo session, which impressed them, as other groups had only snapshots that
were taken by friends. The next morning Kirchherr took photographs with a
Rolleicord camera, at a fairground in a municipal park called Hamburger Dom
which was close to the Reeperbahn, and in the afternoon she took them all
(minus Best, who decided not to go) to her mother's house in Altona.
Kirchherr's bedroom (which was all in black, including the furniture, with
silver foil on the walls and a large tree branch suspended from the ceiling),
was decorated especially for Voormann, with whom she had a relationship,
although after the visits to the Kaiserkeller their relationship became purely
platonic. Kirchherr started dating Sutcliffe, although she always remained a
close friend of Voormann.
Kirchherr
later supplied Sutcliffe and the other Beatles with Preludin, which, when taken
with beer, made them feel euphoric and helped to keep them awake until the
early hours of the morning. The Beatles had taken Preludin before, but it was
only possible at the time to obtain Preludin with a doctor's prescription note.
Kirchherr's mother received them from a local chemist, who supplied them
without asking questions. After meeting Kirchherr, Lennon filled his letters to
Cynthia Powell (his girlfriend at the time) with "Astrid said this, Astrid
did that", which made Powell jealous, until she read that Sutcliffe was in
a relationship with Kirchherr.When Powell visited Hamburg with Dot Rhone
(McCartney's girlfriend at the time) in April 1961, they stayed at Kirchherr's
house. In August 1963, Kirchherr met Lennon and Cynthia in Paris while they
were both there for a belated honeymoon, as Kirchherr was there with a
girlfriend for a few days' holiday. The four of them went from wine bar to wine
bar and finally ended up back at Kirchherr's lodgings, where all four fell
asleep on Kirchherr's single bed.
The Beatles
met Kirchherr again in Hamburg in 1966 when they were touring Germany, and
Kirchherr gave Lennon the letters he had written to Sutcliffe in 1961 and 1962.
Lennon said it was "the best present I've had in years". All of the
Beatles wrote many letters to Kirchherr: "I only have a couple from George
[Harrison], which I'll never show anyone, but he wrote so many. So did the
others. I probably threw them away. You do that when you're young – you don't
think of the future." Harrison later asked Kirchherr to arrange the cover
of his Wonderwall Music album in 1968.
The Beatles
haircut and clothes
Kirchherr
is credited with inventing the Beatles' moptop haircut although she disagreed,
saying: "All that rubbish people said, that I created their hairstyle,
that's rubbish! Lots of German boys had that hairstyle. Stuart [Sutcliffe] had
it for a long while and the others copied it. I suppose the most important
thing I contributed to them was friendship."In 1995, Kirchherr told BBC
Radio Merseyside: "All my friends in art school used to run around with
this sort of what you call Beatles haircut. And my boyfriend then, Klaus
Voormann, had this hairstyle, and Stuart liked it very very much. He was the
first one who really got the nerve to get the Brylcreem out of his hair and
asking me to cut his hair for him. Pete [Best] has really curly hair and it
wouldn't work." Kirchherr says that after she cut Sutcliffe's hair,
Harrison asked her to do the same when she was visiting Liverpool, and Lennon
and McCartney had their hair cut in the same style while they were in Paris, by
Kirchherr's friend, Vollmer, who was living there at the time as an assistant
to photographer William Klein.
After
moving into the Kirchherr family's house, Sutcliffe used to borrow her clothes,
as he was the same height as Kirchherr. He wore her leather pants and jackets,
collarless jackets, oversized shirts, and long scarves. He also borrowed a
corduroy suit with no lapels that he wore on stage, which prompted Lennon to
sarcastically ask if his mother had lent him the suit.
Stuart
Sutcliffe
Sutcliffe
wrote to friends that he was infatuated with Kirchherr, and asked her friends
which colours, films, books and painters she liked, and whom she fancied. Best
later commented that the beginning of their relationship was, "like one of
those fairy stories". Kirchherr says that she immediately fell in love
with Sutcliffe, and referred to him as "the love of my life".
Kirchherr and Sutcliffe got engaged in November 1960, and exchanged rings, as
is the German custom. Sutcliffe later wrote to his parents that he was engaged
to Kirchherr, which they were shocked to learn, as they thought he would give
up his career as an artist, although he told Kirchherr that he would like to be
an art teacher in London or Germany in the future.
Kirchherr
and Sutcliffe went to Liverpool in the summer of 1961, as Kirchherr wanted to
meet Sutcliffe's family (and to see Liverpool) before their marriage. Everybody
was expecting a strange beatnik artist from Hamburg, but Kirchherr turned up at
the Sutcliffes' house at 37 Aigburth Drive, Liverpool, bearing a single
long-stemmed orchid in her hand as a present, and dressed in a round-necked
cashmere sweater and tailored skirt.
In 1962,
Sutcliffe collapsed in the middle of an art class in Hamburg. He was suffering
from intense headaches, and Kirchherr's mother had German doctors perform
checks on him, although they were unable to determine the cause of his
headaches. While living at the Kirchherrs' house in Hamburg, his condition
deteriorated. On 10 April 1962, Kirchherr's mother phoned her daughter at work
and told her Sutcliffe was not feeling well, had been brought back to the
house, and an ambulance had been called for. Kirchherr rushed home and rode
with Sutcliffe in the ambulance, but he died in her arms before it reached the
hospital.
Three days
later Kirchherr met Lennon, McCartney and Best at the Hamburg airport (they
were returning to Hamburg to perform) and told them Sutcliffe had died of a
brain haemorrhage. Harrison and manager Brian Epstein arrived on another
plane sometime later with Sutcliffe's mother, who had been informed by telegram.
Harrison and Lennon were helpful towards the distraught Kirchherr, with Lennon
telling her one day that she definitely had to decide if she wanted to
"Live or die, there is no other question."
Freelance
photographer
In 1964,
Kirchherr became a freelance photographer, and with her colleague Max Scheler
she took "behind the scenes" photographs of the Beatles during the
filming of A Hard Day's Night, as an assignment for the German Stern magazine.
Epstein had forbidden any publicity photographs to be taken without his
permission, but Kirchherr phoned Harrison, who said he would arrange it, but
added, "Only if they pay you."
Stern
phoned Bill Harry at his Mersey Beat newspaper and asked if he could arrange a
photograph of all the groups in Liverpool, so Harry suggested Kirchherr be the
photographer, although Kirchherr later said she placed an advertisement in the
Liverpool Echo newspaper. Kirchherr and Scheler said that any group who wanted
their photograph taken in front of St. George's Hall would be paid per
musician, but over 200 groups turned up on the day, which meant Kirchherr and
Scheler soon ran out of money. Kirchherr didn't publish the photographs until
1995, in a book called Liverpool Days, which is a limited-edition collection of
black-and-white photographs. In 1999, a companion book called Hamburg Days was
published (a two-volume limited edition), containing a set of photographs by
Kirchherr and "memory drawings" by Voormann. The drawings are
recollections of places and situations that Voormann clearly remembers, but
Kirchherr had never photographed, or had lost the photographs.
Kirchherr described
how difficult it was to be accepted as a female photographer in the 1960s:
"Every magazine and newspaper wanted me to photograph the Beatles again.
Or they wanted my old stuff, even if it was out of focus, whether they were
nice or not. They wouldn't look at my other work. It was very hard for a girl
photographer in the 60s to be accepted. In the end I gave up. I've hardly taken
a photo since 1967."Kirchherr was quoted as saying that When We Was Fab
(Genesis Publications 2007), would be her last book of photographs: "I
have decided it is time to create one book in which I am totally involved so
that it contains the pictures I like most, printed the way I would print them,
even down to the text and design.... This book is me and that is why it will be
the last one. The very last one."
Kirchherr
expressed respect for other photographers, such as Annie Leibovitz (because of
the humour in her work), Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Jim Rakete and Reinhard
Wolf (German Wikipedia), and French film-makers François Truffaut, and Jean
Cocteau. Kirchherr said that her favourite photos are the ones she took of
Sutcliffe by the Baltic sea, and of Lennon and Harrison in her attic room at
45a Eimsbütteler Strasse. She expressed reservations about digital photography,
saying that a photographer should concentrate on the art of photography and not
on the technical results, although admitting that she knew nothing about
computers and was "afraid of the internet".
Kirchherr
admitted she was not good at business because of insufficient organisation, and
had never really looked after the negatives of her photographs to prove
ownership. Her business partner Ulf Krüger—a songwriter and record
producer—successfully found many of Astrid's negatives and photographs and had
them copyrighted, although he believes that Kirchherr lost over the years
because of people using her photographs without permission. In July 2001,
Kirchherr visited Liverpool to open an exhibition of her work at the Mathew
Street art gallery, which is close to the former site of The Cavern Club. She
appeared as a guest at the city's Beatles Week Festival during the August Bank
Holiday. Kirchherr's work has been exhibited internationally in places, such as
Hamburg, Bremen, London, Liverpool, New York City, Washington D.C., Tokyo,
Vienna, and at the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.
Later life
In 1967,
Kirchherr married English drummer Gibson Kemp (born Gibson Stewart Kemp, 1945,
Liverpool, Lancashire), who had replaced Ringo Starr in Rory Storm and the
Hurricanes. The marriage ended in divorce after seven years. She then worked as
a barmaid, as an interior designer, and then for a music publishing firm,
getting married for a second time to a German businessman.Kirchherr worked as
an advisor in 1994 on the film Backbeat, which portrayed Kirchherr, Sutcliffe
and the Beatles during their early days in Hamburg. She was impressed with
Stephen Dorff (who played Sutcliffe in the film), commenting that he was the
right age (19 years old at the time), and his gestures, the way he smoked, and
talked were so like Sutcliffe's that she had goose pimples. Kirchherr was
portrayed in the film by Sheryl Lee.
Starting in
the mid-1990s, Kirchherr and business partner Krüger operated the K&K
photography shop in Hamburg, offering custom vintage prints, books and artwork
for sale. K&K periodically helps arrange Beatles' conventions and other
Beatles' events in the Hamburg area.She had no children, and lived alone.
She commented in 1995: "My [second] marriage ended in 1985... I regretted
I had no children. I just couldn't see me have any. But now I am pleased when I see the
situation the world is in. I live alone and am very happy."
Kirchherr
died on 12 May 2020 in Hamburg, following "a short, serious illness",
a week prior to her 82nd birthday. News of her death was first announced by
Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn via Twitter. He praised her involvement with
the band as "immeasurable", and credited her as an "intelligent,
inspirational, innovative, daring, artistic, awake, aware, beautiful, smart,
loving and uplifting friend to many".
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