During the lead-in sequence of Richard Lester's 1963 film, A Hard Day's Night, an off-screen camera whirs away on motor-drive while a montage of black and white images of the Beatles flash before the audience. Ringo Starr smiles... whirr... Ringo winks... whirr... Ringo covers his eyes with his hands... whirr. The snapshots accumulate into strips, slide in and out of the frame, fragment into pieces. A Hard Day's Night, which softened the American terrain for pop music's triumphant British Invasion the following year's, inscribed photography into nearly every scene, from the click of shutters in the fictionalized press conference, to the use of the camera as comedic prop for Ringo Starr, the ubiquitous presence of cameras in an ersatz television special the film purports to document, and the 8 x 10 glossies of the band raining down from a helicopter at the movie's close. The film – itself a photographic project -- put the world on notice: the Beatles were something to be seen. They could play, sing, and write too, of course. But their true brilliance, and what separated them from the rest of their Merseyside peers, transcended music. Beginning with the first photo sessions with Astrid Kirchhner in Hamburg in 1961, who gave them new combed-forward "mop top" haircuts for the occasion, the Beatles became an aesthetic, a way of speaking, an ideology, a one-stop shopping bonanza of music, fashion, and identity -- a pictorial movement. According to John Lennon, in those early years the group pursued a single-minded goal: to be "bigger than Elvis." By 1964, following the phenomenal success of She Loves You, I Want to Hold Your Hand, Can't Buy Me Love, A Hard Day's Night, and I Feel Fine – all number one hits on the American music charts that year -- they had become instead, as Lennon famously remarked, "more poplular than Jesus." Hard on the heels of John F. Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963, their two minute blasts of high-octane punching through the AM radios unleashed pandemonium, what John Lennon referred to as the "bloody tribal rites" of Beatlemania. The savvy handling of manager Brian Epstein -- who convinced the band to exchange their leather jackets for mohair suits -- often receives the credit for rescuing the band from obscurity. But it was the Beatles themselves, armed with a battalion of photographers, designers, cinematographers, and anchored by the incessant Lennon-McCartney hit-making machine, who ultimately called the shots. If they channeled grief and release after the Kennedy assasination, they were also the natural inheritors of JFK's photo-driven legacy. After all, as icons they had a bit of what he'd had -- the quick wit, the photogenic looks, the self-deprecating humor, breezy confidence, the smell of success. Had this been all, though, the band might have occupied the same place in the Sixties as Frank Sinatra did in the Fourties, or the Elvis Presley in the Fifties. But as early Sixties' optimism gave way to escalation, demonstrations, division, and assassinations, the Beatles displayed their most uncanny genius: reinvention. Both highly-attuned to trends and carefree enough to buck them, with chameleon-like agility they not only kept up with the roller coaster ride of the decade, but helped define the contours of "the new." From She Loves You to Revolution they wrote the soundtrack to the movie called the Sixties. But the four young scruffs who reached the pinnacle of success before exploding in acrimonious individuality, were also its stars. Today the mythology of the Beatles stands as one of the great moral tales of the era, a passage from innocence and group harmony, through drugs and politics, exploding in the individualism of the ME Generation. Like the Sixties itself, this narrative isn't recalled in speeches, or even songs, but – unlike radio-celebrity before and TV-celebrity after – in photographs. Just as the Sixties returns today in photographic flashes -- John-John saluting his father's casket, the balcony of the Atlanta motel after the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination, Robert Kennedy mortally wounded on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, a shocked female student over the body of her dead friend at Kent State University, Kim Phuc, the napalm girl running down a road in Vietnam – so does the Beatle story persist in images, pictures dateable to the year, maybe month, by the hair, clothes, shoes, guitars, and their faces which quickly metamorphosed under the spot-light of fame. From shrieking girls and the mop-topped fab four on the Ed Sullivan Show, to bonfires of Beatle records in the American South after Lennon's "Christ" comment, to the psychedelic soldiers of Sgt. Pepper, sitting cross-legged with the Maharishi in India, and John and Yoko Ono in bed in Amsterdam -- each image is a snapshot of the times, a corrolary to the front pages. The recent The Beatles Anthology (Chronicle Books), with hundreds of photographs, makes the point. Compare it to the near-simultaneous release of The Beatles 1 CD (EMI/Capital), which has become the best-selling musical release of all-time, reducing the entire Beatle catalogue to just the twenty-seven number one hits. While the music is repackaged in increasingly smaller packages, the photographic record steadily increases. The CD's sell the narrowing band-width of greatest hits. The pictures tend the burgeoning mythology. With the Beatles this mythology has at times proven both excessive and violent. As the boys run from the adoring mob during the opening credits of A Hard Day's Night, today it's hard not to grow anxious. What if the crowd actually caught them? In light of the recent stabbing of George Harrison, and the indelible memory of John Lennon's murder at the hands of 25 year-old loner, Mark David Chapman on December 8, 1980, the world's first celebrity assassination, it's hard not to believe they would have been torn to pieces. No president was ever elected again without the cooperation of images, and with the Beatles, the identification with personality over and above music became a staple feature of pop. Madonna, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, NSYNC -- the Beatles created the appetite MTV satisfies. "For today's rock bands, it's all about looks and image in a way that is more closely related to advertising and the selling of "product", says Lee Rinaldo, guitarist for the band Sonic Youth. "... but in ways somehow less interesting than they were then, when style somehow equated more with a political or social or cultural point of view than vapid advertisements for making money. The photos somehow impressed on the world at large a magical quality to these four guys." Text by Jacques Menasche 2001 © Contact Press Images