It was just another job for young photographer Henry Grossman when Time magazine hired him to shoot behind-the-scenes images of The Beatles’ first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” But that telecast ended up being an iconic moment in rock history, and that one-off assignment ended up spanning four years as Grossman followed the Fab Four to The Bahamas and Austria during the production of “Help!”
“I wasn’t a fan of the music particularly,” Grossman says. “I always listened to classical music, opera, concert music, that kind of stuff. But I became a fan of them. They were some of the best people I’ve ever known.”
After shooting more than 6,500 snapshots of the band between 1964 and 1968, Grossman filed his unpublished photos away and never gave much thought to them again. “I was busy,” he says. “I was going to the White House, photographing Broadway shows, political personalities, poets, writers. I put the photos away in an archive; I thought I had exhausted everything that could be done with them.”
Publishers Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan thought differently. After discovering Grossman’s horde, they worked with him to assemble “Places I Remember: My Time With the Beatles,” a collection of more than a thousand of Grossman’s photographs, almost all of them never seen before.
Besides his busy photography career, worked as an actor and Wagnerian tenor, performing on Broadway and at the Metropolitan Opera, He studied with Lee Strasberg alongside classmates like Dustin Hoffman and Elliot Gould. But he still looks back fondly on his years with The Beatles.
“Looking at the photos in this book is like revisiting old friends,” he says. “I thought they were charming, witty, intelligent, and as I got to know them I realized how unique each one of them was individually, but how also unique they were as a group. They were terrific fun.”
