Robert Freeman, the man who helped define The Beatles, dies at 82

His covers for 'With the Beatles,' 'Rubber Soul' and other records helped define the group's imagery early in their career

Robert Freeman, who helped define the image of the Beatles by taking the cover photographs for five of their early albums, including With the Beatles and Rubber Soul, died on November 6 in a hospital in London. He was 82. 

Freeman’s association with the Beatles was relatively brief — about three years — but memorable. He shot his first album cover for them in 1963 as their popularity was soaring, then joined them in 1964 on their tour of the United States; he photographed his last in late 1965, for Rubber Soul, which drew attention for its distinctive distorted picture.

That image was a twist on the standard group shot. Freeman was projecting slides from his photo shoot onto an album-size piece of cardboard propped on a table. When the cardboard tilted backward, the effect was a fisheye version of the band’s faces. John Lennon dominated the picture “like some cruelly impassive, suede-collared Tartar prince,” Philip Norman wrote in John Lennon: The Life (2008).

The band loved it. As Paul McCartney recalled on his website after Freeman’s death, “He assured us that it was possible to print it this way, and because the album was titled Rubber Soul we felt that the image fitted perfectly.”

Another sort of serendipity led to Freeman’s cover photograph of the British release With the Beatles in August 1963, his first work with the group.

He had not been a photographer for long, but his portraits of jazz musicians like John Coltrane for The Sunday Times of London and other publications had impressed Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager. Epstein asked Freeman to come to Eastbourne, England, to shoot the cover of their second album.

The conditions were ideal. Light from the windows on one side of a hotel dining room left their faces partly in shadows. A maroon curtain created a dark background behind them.

“They came down at midday wearing their black polo-necked sweaters,” Freeman wrote in his book The Beatles: A Private View (2003). “It seemed natural to photograph them in black-and-white wearing their customary dark clothes. It gave unity to the image. There was no makeup, hairdresser or stylist — just myself, the Beatles and a camera.”

Mindful of how to fit the four Beatles onto an album cover, he asked Ringo Starr to stand in the right corner of the frame and bend his knee, as if he were a rung below the others. “He was the last to join the group, he was the shortest and he was the drummer,” Freeman wrote.

The same picture, but with a bluish tint, appeared early the next year on the United States release of Meet the Beatles! which had many but not all of the same songs as With the Beatles, plus three tracks not on the British album.

McCartney said the photograph was not a carefully arranged studio shot. “I think it took no more than half an hour to accomplish,” he wrote. Freeman’s photography helped create the Beatles’ iconography before they moved onto a pen-and-black-ink illustration for the cover of Revolver, by the bassist and artist Klaus Voormann, and the wildly innovative artwork for the cover of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was designed by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth.

The cover of the album A Hard Day’s Night was distinguished by Freeman’s photographs of each Beatle in five different poses, organised in rows, one Beatle above the other. And his cover photo for Help! showed the Beatles standing side by side in matching blue outfits, making semaphore signals. (He also designed the title sequences for the related movies.)

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