- - Paul McCartney’s “Eyes of the Storm” Photo Exhibit Takes Fans on an Intimate Trip Through Beatlemania’s Early Days

Daniel S. LevineNovember 8, 2025 at 12:21 AM

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Courtesy of the Frist Art Museum

'Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm' at the Frist Art Museum -

Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm is a touring photo exhibit featuring previously unseen photos taken by Paul McCartney during the early days of Beatlemania

The show’s latest stop is the Frist Art Museum in Nashville

It includes nearly 300 photos from McCartney’s personal archive, covering the Beatles’ first trips to Paris and the U.S.

Just a few blocks away from where Nashville’s Beatles fans congregated for Paul McCartney’s latest show in Music City on Thursday, Nov. 6, sits a time machine that has made the Frist Art Museum its latest stop. The museum hosts the touring Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm, an exhibit that lives up to its name and captures a whirlwind three months in the lives of those four lads from Liverpool.

The exhibit, which coincidentally opened on the same day as McCartney’s show at the Pinnacle Theatre, features nearly 300 photos from McCartney’s personal archive, all taken between December 1963 and February 1964. That means it covers the Beatles’ first trip as a band to Paris and their first trip to the U.S.

Fans who vividly remember seeing those 1964 Ed Sullivan Show performances live will experience it from a totally new perspective, while younger fans will feel just how fast pop culture was moving at that point. When the exhibit begins, the Beatles themselves don’t even know if they’ll fizzle out in a few months. By the end, everyone on the planet knows the names John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.

It’s easy to forget just how young they were at the time — Harrison wasn’t even 21 — but these photos capture a group of kids discovering what it means to be famous. In the images, they are still crafting how they want to be viewed by the public. Most candid photos of Lennon show him wearing thick-framed glasses, which he refused to wear in a professional setting. He wasn’t comfortable wearing them in public until after the Beatles secured their fame.

Paul McCartney/MPL Archive LLP

Paul McCartney

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McCartney himself hadn’t even seen the photos in years. When he was putting together an exhibit of photos by his late first wife, Linda McCartney, he remembered taking his own pictures during the Beatles’ early years. His archive team went digging, and the National Portrait Gallery in London expressed interest in exhibiting them.

At first, they thought they would just show off the best pictures from the collection, but as National Portrait Gallery senior curator Rosie Broadley explained to reporters at the Frist, the intimate photos were too eye-opening not to include.

Paul McCartney/MPL Archive LLP

John Lennon

“When we saw this wealth of material, we can see that there was more there and actually seeing the ones that weren’t the most perfect version of the ones that were just them hanging out having tea,” Broadley said. “It was something you didn’t get with any other photographer because they’re not smiling for the camera. It’s not for the press, it’s not for the cover of a magazine or an album. It’s just for Paul.”

Courtesy of the Frist Art Museum

Rosie Broadley, head of collection displays and senior curator of 20th-century collections at London’s National Portrait Gallery (left) and Frist Art Museum Chief Curator Mark Scala (right)

One aspect of the exhibit that might get lost in the storm of Beatlemania is how it also shows how non-professional photographers captured their lives before phones and social media. Many of the pictures show people taking pictures of McCartney and the rest of the group, and they seem surprisingly more fluid and candid than the pictures we share of each other today.

In a world where we are used to cameras and ensuring they only capture the “best” of us, it’s almost impossible to show life as it really is in 2025. In the early ‘60s, though, people still weren’t used to cameras being everywhere, and it shows in McCartney’s pictures.

Paul McCartney/MPL Archive LLP

John Lennon and George Harrison

The pictures without any members of the Beatles are some of the best included here. We can imagine those fans as our parents, uncles, aunts or cousins in their place, watching the magic unfold in real time. They were all kids who wanted to hold the Beatles’ hands, and as these photos show, the Beatles wanted to hold theirs too.

Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm, organized by the National Portrait Gallery in London, will be on display at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville through Jan. 26, 2026. Tickets are available here. Its next North American stop is at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in February 2026.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”