Harry Benson didn’t want to meet the Beatles. The Glasgow-born photographer had plans to cover a news story in Africa when he was assigned to photograph the musicians in Paris. “I took myself for a serious journalist and I didn’t want to cover a rock ’n’ roll story,” he scoffed. But once he met the boys from Liverpool and heard them play, Benson had no desire to leave. “I thought, ‘God, I’m on the right story.’ ” The Beatles were on the cusp of greatness, and Benson was in the middle of it. His pillow-fight photo, taken in the swanky George V Hotel the night the band found out “I Want to Hold Your Hand” hit No. 1 in the U.S., freezes John, Paul, George and Ringo in an exuberant cascade of boyish talent—and perhaps their last moment of unbridled innocence. It captures the sheer joy, happiness and optimism that would be embraced as Beatlemania and that helped lift America’s morale just 11 weeks after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The following month, Benson accompanied the Fab Four as they flew to New York City to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, kick-starting the British Invasion. The trip led to decades of collaboration with the group and, as Benson later recalled, “I was so close to not being there.”
Harry Benson Scottish, b. 1929
https://www.artsy.net/artist/harry-benson
Eminent photojournalist Harry Benson has been capturing historic world events and figures over the course of his celebrated career, building up a body of color and black-and-white photographs that chronicles the tumultuous decades from the 1950s to now. His career skyrocketed in 1964, when he documented the Beatles on their first American tour, and took the now-iconic photograph of the foursome having a pillow fight in bed. On assignment for such publications as the Daily Express and LIFE Magazine, he has marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., photographed every U.S. president since Dwight Eisenhower, innumerable world leaders, artists, and celebrities, and been at the center of such watershed events as the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall and the resignation of Richard Nixon. “Wherever I am,” Benson claims, “the one thing I must do—I must tell the truth.”
Watch the 100 Photos Documentary Short The Pillow Fight
0:00
/
3:59
YOU JUST WATCHED
3:59
8:29
5:33
11:51
5:00
5:32
5:18
5:56
4:12
4:17
8:24
15:11
5:40
3:44
5:44
5:14
8:51
11:41
5:50
11:25
RETURN TO THE COLLECTION
Explore Other Photographs From The 100
about the projectcredits