Astrid Kirchherr

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Astrid Kirchherr once summed up the night that changed her life in a single image: "It was like a merry-go-round in my head, they looked absolutely astonishing... My whole life changed in a couple of minutes." Kirchherr was a German photographer and artist, and the band she was describing was the Beatles in their earliest days.

  She was an art student with a taste for fashion and no interest in rock and roll. Yet her black-and-white pictures became some of the most treasured records of five young musicians before the world knew their names. How did a fashion-minded student from a wealthy suburb end up at the center of that story? What did her camera catch that nobody else's did? And why did she later say she had given up?

  The answers begin with a teenager's idea of what it meant to be cool.

  59271

• 2. Black Clothes and Existentialism

  ›

  On the 20th of May 1938, Astrid Kirchherr was born in Hamburg. Her father was a former executive at the German branch of the Ford Motor Company. Her widowed mother, Nielsa Kirchherr, raised her on Eimsbütteler Strasse, in a wealthy part of the Hamburg suburb of Altona.

  During World War II, the young Astrid was evacuated to the Baltic Sea. She remembered seeing dead bodies on the shore after the ships Cap Arcona and the SS Deutschland were bombed and sunk. When she returned to Hamburg, she saw the destruction left in the city.

  After graduation she enrolled at the Meisterschule für Mode, Textil, Grafik und Werbung in Hamburg, hoping to study fashion design. Instead she showed a talent for black-and-white photography. Reinhard Wolf, the school's main photographic tutor, talked her into switching courses and promised to hire her as his assistant. She worked for him from 1959 until 1963.

  In the late 1950s, Kirchherr and her art school friends belonged to the European existentialist movement, whose followers John Lennon later nicknamed "Exis". She explained the mood in a 1995 interview with BBC Radio Merseyside: "Our philosophy then, because we were only little kids, was wearing black clothes and going around looking moody." France was their model. "England was so far away, and America was out of the question," she said.

  Two schoolmates shared those tastes, a painter named Klaus Voormann and a photographer named Jürgen Vollmer.

  6151022

• 3. The Kaiserkeller

  ›

  In 1960, Klaus Voormann stormed out after an argument with Kirchherr and Vollmer and wandered down the Reeperbahn, in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg. Music drifted out of the Kaiserkeller club. Inside he found a group called the Beatles: Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Sutcliffe, and Best, who was the drummer at the time.

  Voormann was Kirchherr's boyfriend and lived in his own room in her family home. He urged both friends to come and listen. The three had never heard rock and roll, only traditional jazz with some Nat King Cole and The Platters mixed in. The Kaiserkeller sat in a rough part of the Reeperbahn, and Kirchherr needed persuading. Once there, she wanted only to be as close to the band as possible.

  After that the trio went almost every night. They arrived at 9 o'clock and took seats at the front of the stage.

  Kirchherr later said that she, Voormann and Vollmer felt guilty about being German and about their country's recent history. She knew English people might assume she ate sauerkraut and mock her heavy accent. Instead, the band joked about it with her. Lennon would shout from the stage, "You Krauts, we won the war." Few Germans in the crowd understood, but English-speaking sailors roared with laughter.

  Stuart Sutcliffe was fascinated by the three, and especially by Kirchherr. He thought they looked like "real bohemians". Bill Harry later recalled that every head turned when she walked in. Sutcliffe wrote to a friend that he could hardly take his eyes off her. He tried to speak to her during the next break, but she had already left.

  When he finally met the trio, he learned they had all attended the Meisterschule, the same kind of art college that he and Lennon had attended in Liverpool. The morning after that first night, Kirchherr made a request that no other group had made of them.

  5682932

• 4. Photographs and Letters

  ›

  Kirchherr asked whether the Beatles would mind sitting for a proper photo session. They were impressed, because other groups only had snapshots taken by friends. The next morning she photographed them with a Rolleicord camera at the Hamburger Dom, a fairground in a municipal park near the Reeperbahn.

  That afternoon she took them to her mother's house in Altona, all except Best, who decided not to come. Her bedroom was black throughout, furniture included. It had silver foil on the walls and a large tree branch hanging from the ceiling. She had decorated it especially for Voormann. After the Kaiserkeller visits their romance turned platonic, and she began dating Sutcliffe while staying close to Voormann.

  Cynthia Powell, Lennon's girlfriend, grew jealous when his letters kept repeating "Astrid said this, Astrid did that". Her worry faded once she read that Sutcliffe was Kirchherr's partner. In April 1961, Powell and Dot Rhone, McCartney's girlfriend, visited Hamburg and stayed at Kirchherr's house.

  In August 1963, Kirchherr was in Paris on a short holiday with a girlfriend when she met Lennon and Cynthia on their belated honeymoon. The four went from wine bar to wine bar. They ended at her lodgings, where all four fell asleep on her single bed.

  When the Beatles toured Germany in 1966, Kirchherr gave Lennon the letters he had written to Sutcliffe in 1961 and 1962. He called it "the best present I've had in years". Writing was a habit among them. Of Harrison she said, "I only have a couple from George, which I'll never show anyone, but he wrote so many." In 1968, Harrison asked her to arrange the cover of his Wonderwall Music album.

  56303128

• 5. The Moptop Question

  ›

  The Beatles' moptop haircut is often credited to Kirchherr, and she flatly rejected the claim. "All that rubbish people said, that I created their hairstyle, that's rubbish! Lots of German boys had that hairstyle," she said. "Stuart had it for a long while and the others copied it. I suppose the most important thing I contributed to them was friendship."

  In her 1995 radio interview, she explained that her art school friends all wore the style. Voormann had it, and Sutcliffe liked it very much. He was the first to get the Brylcreem out of his hair and ask her to cut it. Best's very curly hair would not have worked.

  According to Kirchherr, Harrison asked for the same cut during a visit she made to Liverpool. Lennon and McCartney had theirs done in Paris by her friend Vollmer, who lived there as an assistant to the photographer William Klein.

  Clothes were a second exchange. After he moved into the Kirchherr family house, Sutcliffe often borrowed her wardrobe, since he was her height. He wore her leather pants and jackets, collarless jackets, oversized shirts, and long scarves. Once he went on stage in her corduroy suit with no lapels. Lennon sarcastically asked whether his mother had lent it to him.

  The man wearing her clothes was also the man she planned to marry.

  56129

• 6. Stuart Sutcliffe

  ›

  Sutcliffe wrote to friends that he was infatuated with Kirchherr. He quizzed her friends about her favourite colours, films, books and painters, and about whom she fancied. Best later said the start of their romance was "like one of those fairy stories". Kirchherr said she fell in love at once and called Sutcliffe "the love of my life".

  They became engaged in November 1960 and exchanged rings, as is the German custom. When Sutcliffe told his parents, they were shocked, fearing he would abandon his career as an artist. He told Kirchherr he would like to be an art teacher in London or Germany one day.

  In the summer of 1961, she travelled with him to Liverpool to meet his family before the marriage. Everyone expected a strange beatnik from Hamburg. Instead she arrived at the Sutcliffes' house at 37 Aigburth Drive carrying one long-stemmed orchid. She wore a round-necked cashmere sweater and a tailored skirt.

  In February 1962, Sutcliffe collapsed in the middle of an art class in Hamburg, suffering intense headaches. Kirchherr's mother had German doctors examine him, but they could not find a cause. His condition worsened while he lived at the Kirchherr house.

  On the 10th of April 1962, Kirchherr's mother phoned to say Sutcliffe had collapsed again and an ambulance was on its way. Kirchherr rushed home and rode with him. He died in her arms before they reached the hospital.

  Three days later she met Lennon, McCartney and Best at the Hamburg airport, as they returned to the city to perform. She told them Sutcliffe had died of a brain haemorrhage. Harrison and the manager Brian Epstein arrived later on another plane with Sutcliffe's mother, who had been told by telegram. Lennon and Harrison both helped the distraught Kirchherr. One day Lennon told her she must decide whether she wanted to "live or die, there is no other question."

  Her working life as a photographer was still ahead, and it began with a phone call to George Harrison.

  56303229

• 7. Behind the Scenes

  ›

  In 1964, Kirchherr became a freelance photographer. With her colleague Max Scheler, she took behind-the-scenes pictures of the Beatles during the filming of A Hard Day's Night for the German magazine Stern. Epstein had forbidden publicity photographs without his permission. Kirchherr phoned Harrison, who agreed to arrange it but added, "Only if they pay you."

  Stern also wanted a photograph of all the groups in Liverpool. The magazine called Bill Harry at his Mersey Beat newspaper, and he suggested Kirchherr. She later said she had placed an advertisement in the Liverpool Echo. She and Scheler promised that any group posing in front of St. George's Hall would be paid per musician. Over 200 groups turned up, and the two soon ran out of money.

  Kirchherr kept those pictures to herself until 1995, when they appeared in Liverpool Days, a limited-edition book of black-and-white photographs. In 1999 came a companion, Hamburg Days, a two-volume limited edition. It paired her photographs with Voormann's "memory drawings" of places and scenes he remembered clearly but she had never photographed or had lost.

  The 1960s made her career harder than it should have been. "Every magazine and newspaper wanted me to photograph the Beatles again," she said. "It was very hard for a girl photographer in the 60s to be accepted. In the end I gave up. I've hardly taken a photo since 1967."

  In 2007, Genesis Publications issued When We Was Fab. She said it would be her last book, because it held the pictures she liked most, printed her way. "This book is me and that is why it will be the last one. The very last one."

  515171921

• 8. Legacy and Last Years

  ›

  Among photographers, Kirchherr admired Annie Leibovitz for the humour in her work, along with Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Jim Rakete and her old tutor Reinhard Wolf. She also admired the French film-makers François Truffaut and Jean Cocteau. Her favourite pictures were of Sutcliffe by the Baltic sea, and of Lennon and Harrison in her attic room at 45a Eimsbütteler Strasse. She distrusted digital photography, said she knew nothing about computers, and admitted she was "afraid of the internet".

  Kirchherr admitted she was poor at business and had never looked after her negatives well enough to prove ownership. Her business partner Ulf Krüger, a songwriter and record producer, tracked down many of them and had them copyrighted. He believes she lost much over the years to people who used her photographs without permission.

  In July 2001, she opened an exhibition of her work at the Mathew Street art gallery in Liverpool, close to the former site of The Cavern Club. She also appeared as a guest at Beatles Week during the August Bank Holiday. Her work has also been shown in Hamburg, Bremen, London, New York City, Washington, D.C., Tokyo, Vienna and at the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.

  In 1967, she married the English drummer Gibson Kemp, who had replaced Ringo Starr in Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. They divorced after seven years. She worked as a barmaid, an interior designer and at a music publishing firm, and later married a German businessman. In 1995 she said that marriage ended in 1985, and that she lived alone and was very happy.

  In 1994, she advised on the film Backbeat, in which Sheryl Lee played her. Stephen Dorff, aged 19, played Sutcliffe. His gestures, smoking and way of talking were so like Sutcliffe's that she got goose pimples. From the mid-1990s she and Krüger ran K&K, a photography shop in Hamburg selling custom vintage prints, books and artwork. The shop also helped arrange Beatles conventions in the Hamburg area.

  On the 12th of May 2020, Kirchherr died in Hamburg after "a short, serious illness", a week before her 82nd birthday. The Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn announced her death on Twitter. He called her involvement with the band "immeasurable" and remembered her as "intelligent, inspirational, innovative, daring, artistic, awake, aware, beautiful, smart, loving and uplifting".

  120222327