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Some of George Harrison‘s most personal photos are being revealed for the first time as part of a new coffee table book from the Beatles guitarist.
The Third Eye: Early Photographs is billed as an “intimate, beautiful collection of more than 200 never-before-collected photos of the Beatles at work and at play.” All of the photos were taken by Harrison through his Pentax film camera between 1963 and 1970, with many of the images being published for the first time in this collection. Those dates span the most prolific years of the Beatles’ career, and the photos cover everything from the making of seminal albums like A Hard Day’s Night to the band’s famous appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and subsequent tours around the world.
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The Third Eye: Early Photographs
The hardcover book features a foreword by Harrison’s wife, Olivia, along with an afterword by American author and Booker Prize winner George Saunders.
In between, the book collects 250 images ranging from unretouched photographs to 8mm movie stills. The images capture behind-the-scenes moments of The Beatles on tour, along with photos from the band’s travels and more personal, introspective moments seen through Harrison’s lens. There are also portraits of John Lennon, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney snapped by Harrison himself.
Publisher Random House says the photos were all curated by Harrison’s widow, Olivia Harrison, and that the book features “singular images” of The Beatles as “they rocketed to stardom and fostered the joyful madness that came to be known as Beatlemania.”
The book features accompanying descriptions and captions taken from Harrison’s own words and written recollections. As he recounts about a concert in Italy, “We’d often talk of having a tour where we didn’t have to play any shows. Everyone was using the mania as an excuse to go mad — the world did and they blamed it on us. But we were just inside of a car or a hotel room and really couldn’t do much of anything — we couldn’t even go outside.”
“I want to show people, from George’s unique photographic perspective during the Beatles’ early years, the moments when the whole of your life is ahead of you with unknowable possibilities,” Olivia Harrison said in a press release. “His images in The Third Eye capture that spirit.”
“I like cameras because you can see things in a different way,” George Harrison once said. “You can make things look how they feel instead of how they are.”
First announced last year, The Third Eye: Early Photographs is available now on Amazon. Released Oct. 6, the book has shot to number one on Amazon’s bestselling photography books chart.
