Harry Benson's photos of the Beatles sparked career

Sunday, November 17, 2013

Photographer Harry Benson’s career spans six decades with work that includes some of the most influential figures in popular culture and politics, but it was a nearly missed chance to shoot the Beatles that launched his career.

The Glasgow-born journalist got his start shooting weddings in 1949, but it wasn’t until 15 years later that his career skyrocketed. “The Beatles were going to Paris and I was going to Africa to cover a news story,” Benson said in an interview with CBC News on Thursday. “I took myself for a serious journalist and I didn’t want to cover a rock 'n' roll story,” he said. Benson did, however, take the Beatles assignment at the insistence of an editor at the London Daily Express newspaper, and the timing could not have been better. vShortly after he took a photo of the Fab Four mid-pillow fight in their Paris hotel room – the photograph he described as the defining image of his career – their hit song I Want To Hold Your Hand became the band’s first U.S. chart-topper and Benson was on the flight for their first trip to New York.

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