A remarkable photographic chronicle by legendary Life
Magazine photojournalist Bill
Eppridge of the Beatles’
historic 1964 visit to the United States will be featured in a Western Connecticut State University Art Gallery exhibition that
will open Tuesday, Jan. 19, and
continue through Saturday, March 13,
at the university’s Visual
and Performing Arts Center.
A collection of 55 black-and-white photographs taken by
Eppridge during his coverage for Life of the British rock group’s visit to New
York and Washington from Feb. 7 through 12, 1964, will be shown in the
exhibition, “The Beatles: Six Days That Changed the World,” sponsored by the
WCSU Department of Art. An opening
reception will be held from 4 to 7 p.m. on Saturday,
Jan. 23, in the Art Gallery at the arts center on the WCSU Westside campus,
43 Lake Ave. Extension in Danbury. Reservations to attend the free public
reception may be made on the VPAC events Web page at www.wcsuvpac.eventbrite.com.
Eppridge, who resided in New Milford in his later years, died
in October 2013 in Danbury after an extraordinary career as a photojournalist
spanning 60 years. He is widely recognized for capturing iconic images of contemporary
history including the Beatles’ Feb. 9, 1964, appearance on “The Ed Sullivan
Show” and the poignant
image on June 6, 1968, of a busboy kneeling beside the mortally wounded
Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen moments after his
assassination. “You are not just a photojournalist,” he said in recalling the
Kennedy image. “You’re a historian.”
Yet the WCSU exhibition of selections from his 1964 Beatles
tour photo shoot, which consumed more than 90 rolls of film and 3,000
photographs, would have been impossible without the mysterious recovery of
these images seven years after they went missing and the painstaking work of
Eppridge’s editor and wife, Adrienne
Aurichio, to review and organize this vast photo archive into a
comprehensive record of the Beatles’ tour as it unfolded.
Aurichio recalled in a 2014 essay
for CBS News marking the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ “Ed
Sullivan Show” appearance that the 26-year-old Eppridge found himself in the
right place on the morning of Feb. 7, 1964, to draw the assignment from Life
Magazine photography director Dick Pollard to cover the Beatles’ arrival that
day at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. He followed the Beatles as Life’s
photo correspondent throughout the first six days of their U.S. tour, shooting
spontaneous images documenting performances, rehearsals and private moments during
the tour that established the group as an international rock ‘n’ roll sensation.
At the time, Life Magazine published just four of the images
from Eppridge’s assignment, and the original film submitted to the Time-Life
photo lab for processing could not be located when he attempted several months
later to retrieve the images. By his account, at least seven years passed
before the film turned up on his desk with no explanation of how it had been
recovered.
Aurichio’s role in re-creating Eppridge’s Life photo
chronicle of the 1964 Beatles tour began in 1993 when she came across one of
his prints from the shoot while researching photographs for a magazine project.
Intrigued at the prospect of discovering more photos from the Beatles visit,
she soon learned the full story of Eppridge’s recovered film chronicle, which
provided the images featured in the WCSU exhibition and in the book, “The Beatles: Six
Days That Changed the World,” released in 2014 by Rizzoli Publishing. In his acknowledgments for the book, Eppridge
noted that Aurichio played a critical part as co-editor in “piecing together my
story. I relied on her vision and experience as an editor to research and unravel
the photographs, and then pull them together in chronological order.”
