Robert Freeman (photographer)

Robert Freeman (born 1936) is a photographer and designer, most famous for his album cover photos for The Beatles and his design work on the end credit sequences of their first two films and the related film posters and advertising materials.

He was the Beatles' most favoured photographer during the years 1963 to 1966 and shot arguably the most well known images of them. He photographed and designed the covers for five consecutive album covers of the Beatles-sanctioned UK album releases on the Parlophone label. Most of those images were also adapted by Capitol Records for the US releases they compiled from the Beatles' UK recordings. He also directed the rarely seen Swinging London cult film The Touchables in 1968, which starred Judy Huxtable and David Anthony, and featured music by the original Nirvana.

Freeman first came to prominence as a photo journalist working for the British newspaper The Sunday Times – for which he photographed a variety of subjects including Nikita Khrushchev in the Kremlin. He had also become noted for his black-and-white photographs of several jazz musicians including John Coltrane. It was these photographs that impressed the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein and the Beatles themselves and led to his first commission in August 1963 to photograph the group. He was selected to photograph the entirety of the first-ever Pirelli Calendar – shot in 1963 for the year 1964.

Robert Freeman graduated from Cambridge in 1959. "...In the summer of '63. I'd been a photographer for two years but had already established a reputation through my work for the Sunday Times and other magazines. I'd recently been on assignment in Moscow to photograph Khrushchev in the Kremlin, and earlier that year had shot the first Pirelli calendar. This was a big hit and, in later years, a media event. But my favourite assignment during that period was photographing John Coltrane and other jazz musicians at a festival in London. It was photographs of these musicians that I later showed to the Beatles... I contacted their press agent in London. He referred me to Brian Epstein, their manager, who asked me to send samples of my work to Llandudno, in Wales, where the Beatles were playing at the time. I put together a portfolio of large black-and-white prints, most of which were portraits of jazz musicians – Cannonball Adderley, Dizzy Gillespie, Elvin Jones, Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane. The Beatles' response was positive – they liked the photographs and, as a result, Brian arranged for me to meet them in Bournemouth a week later where they were booked to play several evenings at the local Gaumont cinema."

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