05/04/2007

Special to the Record-Eagle
Bill Eppridge's photos of the Beatles during the height of their early popularity are part of the Crooked Tree Arts Center photo exhibit running until July 8.

Photographer documents history's highs and lows at exhibit

Iconic images of Beatles at Crooked Tree

By GARRET ELLISON

gellison@record-eagle.com

Eppridge

PETOSKEY — Bill Eppridge and the rest of the New York press corps thought they'd face a bunch of security goons when the jet carrying a young British rock band landed at Kennedy International Airport in New York City on Feb. 7, 1964.

Instead, four young gentlemen in suits stepped out and the girls in the crowd started to scream.

"There was no ego there at all,” recalls Eppridge, tapped by LIFE Magazine editors to chronicle the Fab Four's first American tour. His iconic images tour internationally and the Crooked Tree Arts Center in Petoskey is exhibiting 84 of them as "The Beatles! Backstage and Behind the Scenes” until July 8.

"Frankly, I don't think they realized who they were, or what they were, or what would become of them at the time,” Eppridge said.

What happened after has become the stuff of legend. John, Paul, George and Ringo went on "The Ed Sullivan Show” and their performances launched a cultural revolution. The young gentlemen became arguably the most famous band in history.

And Eppridge was there to record it. A noted photojournalist with international acclaim, he has covered revolutions in Latin America, heroin addicts in New York City and was steps away from Robert Kennedy when the Senator was assassinated on June 5, 1968. He currently shoots the great outdoors for Sports Illustrated.

Ringo coined him "Mr. LIFE Magazine” during the tour.

"It was a time of change,” he said. "There was no inkling that anything like this would happen until we got to the airport and saw the size of the crowd and the intensity and fervor, the little girls in particular.”

He became the fly on the wall after that, always looking for the candid moment between the band members. He said his compositions are mostly full framed and "terribly precise.”

"They are as they were shot in the camera,” he said about the exhibit images. A favorite of his show, the band's shoes, called "winklepickers,” which he still kicks himself for not getting more shots of.

A student of the journalism school at the University of Missouri, he's no stranger to the "decisive moment” of photography.

"You're always looking for something happening,” he said. "Something going on that's going to make one plus one equal three.”

Eppridge was a stringer when he shot the Beatles for LIFE in 1965 and he covered Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1968. He was several feet away from the senator in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when a 24-year-old Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan pushed through the crowd of supporters and press and shot Kennedy in the head.

"I remember thinking — it just went through my head — you're no longer a journalist, you're a historian and keep that camera up there,” Eppridge said. "I almost had to force myself when he was laying there on the floor in front of me, but that's the only thing I could do. There was a pile of doctors in the room and there was nothing I could do to help, but I sure could document it.”

His film of the melee almost didn't make it, though. An adrenaline-fueled Eppridge undercompensated for the light, and told a film courier to push process the film one F-stop. Luckily the man knew Eppridge's shooting habits and pushed the film two stops instead. The resulting negatives were thin, but useable.

Eppridge is currently putting several books together between assignments for Sports Illustrated.