Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA)

Scottish photographer Harry Benson was only thirty-four and still establishing his reputation when the editor of London’s Daily Express requested that he cover The Beatles’ trip to Paris in early 1964. While at the George V Hotel in Paris, Benson took a series of pictures of the band in a spirited pillow fight. The intimate quality of this visual account would come to characterize many of Benson’s subsequent photographs of The Beatles. He later accompanied the Fab Four on the road for their first U.S. tour, framing for posterity their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, their unexpected meeting with Cassius Clay, and the rapturous bedlam that was New York Beatlemania. Benson also went on to take photos at George Harrison’s Barbados honeymoon, on the set of the album-inspired film, A Hard Day’s Night, and on The Beatles’ 1966 tour, during which John Lennon quipped that the band had become “more popular than Jesus.” In the decades that followed, Benson photographed every U.S. President, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, and various celebrities, including Elizabeth Taylor, Bobby Fischer, and Michael Jackson.