The Beatles Influence
Photos and music videos
"Their rapid ascent to vast international fame quickly made the four Beatles among the most photographed people in history. As part of the assiduous image management of the band overseen by manager Brian Epstein, the group was assigned a succession of leading photographers -- most notably Dezo Hoffmann and Robert Whitaker -- who helped Epstein to carefully sculpt the group's visual image. Whitaker took many of the best known photographs of the band during their heyday as a touring act between 1964 and 1966, including the famous photographs of their legendary Shea Stadium concert.
One other notable photographer who worked with the band was Richard Avedon, who photographed them for a famous and much reproduced series of psychedelic portraits in 1967, as well as the four portrait shots included as inserts with their 1968 album The Beatles ('The White Album').
The Beatles began filming promotional music videos for their songs in the early 1960s, mainly because they wanted to send them to television programs so they wouldn't have to appear in person.
Perhaps the single most influential of all the visual representations of The Beatles was their first film A Hard Day's Night, directed by Richard Lester. It pioneered many now-standard techniques including the cutting of images to the beat of the music, and it is arguable that this film became the basic template from which the music video as a genre emerged. Especially notable is the "Can't Buy Me Love" segment, which features creative camera work, and the band running and jumping around in a field -- a device which almost immediately has become de rigeur for virtually every pop band since. (George Harrison of The Beatles and Michael Nesmith of The Monkees went on to become pioneering music video directors). Beatles promo videos include "Day Tripper," "Help!," "We Can Work It Out," "Ticket To Ride," "Paperback Writer," "Rain," "I Feel Fine," "Hello Goodbye," "Penny Lane," "A Day in the Life", "Revolution," "Lady Madonna," "Hey Jude," "The Ballad of John and Yoko," and "Something."
Their most innovative film-clip, which remains one of the landmarks of the genre, was that made in 1967 for the single "Strawberry Fields Forever". Shot in the late winter, in the afternoon and early evening, on Salisbury Plain, it depicted the group at the peak of their psychedelic phase, with long hair, colourful clothes, moustaches and what was soon to become Lennon's trademark, his 'granny glasses'. It used many techniques previously only seen in experimental film, including intricate jump-cuts that rapidly alternated between night and day, reversed film and other avant-garde devices."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles_influence
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