Imagine a day in the life of a Beatle

From an era before selfies, Paul McCartney’s cache of photos, even the out of focus ones, prompts Jamie Mulvaney to consider what perspective we need on ourselves.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Associate Minister at Holy Trinity Clapham, London.

Two gallery vistor stair at four photo portraits of The Beatles.

Viewing Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm.

National Portrait Gallery.

Imagine a day in the life of a Beatle. It's easy if you try. Or is it?

Last year, the late Matthew Perry allowed us a searing insight into life with a rollicking read about his very high highs and very low lows. Yet more books have been published recently on the toxicity of fame. Britney Spears is the subject of an autobiography and a biography. Another simply borrows the title, Toxic. John Updike wrote that 'fame is the mask that eats the face'. Baz Luhrmann last year documented Elvis Presley's destruction in his typically kaleidoscopic way. And into this media mix a recent exhibition shows a more innocent, intimate moment in the fame prototype of Beatlemania, intriguingly entitled Eyes of the Storm.

Surely with the Beatles predating the selfie-stick and Snapchat, we'd be reliant on paparazzi. But as Sir Paul McCartney can play pretty much every musical instrument, it's not a surprise he knows how to use a camera. And so, it emerged during lockdown that he had kept 1,000 previously unseen photos from 1961-1963.

To relaunch the beautifully remodelled National Portrait Gallery, McCartney displayed a whole cache of photos. One of the criticisms of present-day photography is that it's too easy, that we retain all sorts of out-of-focus photos on our phone. McCartney had preserved all these, and although it's curated and edited, there's many photos that wouldn't normally be seen.

You get the fab four goofing about, and also in quieter moments. There's young George looking shattered in the back of a car, and John concentrating. McCartney forgot that Lennon pulled this particular face, with his finger to his lip. His song 'Help!' emerged a year later. He told Playboy, 'I was fat and depressed, and I was crying out for 'help'.’ They were indeed in the eye of a storm.

We’ve lived with an orthodoxy that we understand ourselves through self-expression – that we ourselves are the ones to define who we are.

And in the middle of the storm, we see the Beatles finding moments of joy. They land in New York for the Ed Sullivan Show, at the top of the charts and the top of their fame. Fans chasing them down Manhattan streets, fans balancing precariously on an airport roof, and one inexplicably holds a monkey. American optimism had been battered by JFK's assassination and the Beatles' arrival was a welcome respite. This joy became even clearer (and more vivid?) as McCartney switched to colour when they reached Miami. But before the colour, the songwriter in conversation with Stanley Tucci singled out seeing a worker he snapped while they were on the train – perhaps a mirror to his own working-class roots and family.

But then there are also the more explicit self-reflections… A series that struck me were McCartney's self-portraits, looking in mirror, out of focus. McCartney said that his first thought was this was the National Portrait Gallery - at least they could be in focus! But then he realised they had a warmth, and a softness to them.

Those of us who are not Beatles, or famous, also often live our lives out of focus, with blind spots, or a little dizzy from the storms around us and within us. Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor, before the selfie was invented, wrote about our self-perception in relation to the outside world, and that we are 'self-interpreting animals'.

Since the eighteenth century we’ve lived with an orthodoxy that we understand ourselves through self-expression – that we ourselves are the ones to define who we are and how we relate to the world - even how we relate to ourselves. It’s so much the norm, it might seem confronting to question it, but in an increasingly confusing world, this is an increasingly difficult way to understand ourselves. Whilst many of the Beatles' songs are about perception, King David also wrote in the psalms about our need for an external perspective:

'You have searched me, Lord,

and you know me.

You know when I sit and when I rise;

you perceive my thoughts from afar.'

What we each need is a perspective on ourselves from the outside that is warm, soft, but also in focus. What if there was a perspective on ourselves free from blind spots, a precision lens that fully sees and fully understands the essence of who we are, and who we might be? Someone who sees the deleted photos, and yet is completely gentle and loving in how they see us? The way we truly understand ourselves is in relation to our Creator. God shows us both what is seen and unseen. Like in these photos, God is not fazed by the contrast of light and darkness, and provides a way out of the storm:

'Search me, God, and know my heart;

test me and know my anxious thoughts.

See if there is any offensive way in me,

and lead me in the way everlasting.'

Review

Change

Freedom of Belief

22 April 2023

4 min read

Face to face with the danger of faith

In the face of compassion fatigue, connecting with the humanity of a cause requires the artistic, not just the imperative. Belle Tindall reviews Clay and Canvas.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

A refugee looks out from a cover photograph of a book resting upright against a cylinder

The cover of Clay & Canvas.

Open Doors.

In 2018, in the Houses of Parliament, Hannah Rose Thomas displayed a collection of radiant portraits she had painted of Yazidi women who had escaped ISIS captivity. She did this to bring their ongoing plight to the attention of the Government. In 2019, at the London Riverside Development, three photographers (Chris de Bode, Abbie Trayler-Smith and Nora Lorek) used their photographs to powerfully tell the story of the hunger crisis in Sudan, Liberia, and the Central African Republic. In 2021, a 3.5-metre-tall interactive puppet of a 10-year-old Syrian girl named Amal was walked from Turkey to Kent, and in so doing, gave the world a glimpse of what such a journey entails for thousands of refugee children. And in 2022, the advocacy group, Open Doors, published a striking book entitled Clay and Canvas, which compellingly tells seven stories of individuals who have faced un-imaginable trauma because of their belief in Jesus.

While these projects were created by different people, at different times, highlighting different situations, it seems to me that the powerful impact of all four artistic offerings is twofold. Firstly, they each force us to move beyond numbers and statistics, inviting us to come face-to-face with the humanity behind the headlines. And secondly, the utter beauty with which these pieces have been both created and curated hints at the startling beauty that can be found in the midst of pain. The glimmers of light that are ever present, even in the darkest of contexts.

This is most certainly the case with Clay and Canvas.

Its strikingly minimal aesthetic ensures that it can comfortably sit alongside the most classic of ‘coffee table books,’ but instead of being filled with recipes, interior decoration inspiration, or the complete lyrical works of Paul McCartney, this holds within it stories that will simultaneously break and inspire its reader’s heart.

There are around 360 million people in the world who are currently under some sort of threat because of the Christian beliefs that they hold, and this book tells just seven of those harrowing stories.

It introduces us to Baheer and Medet, two friends who played together as children, but now find themselves in a torture chamber. One of them is being electrocuted because of his Christian beliefs, while the other is looking on at the torture of the friend that he himself had reported to the authorities. Both are utterly terrified.

We also meet Rebekah, Eti and Ratina as they are thrown into the back of a police van, sentenced to five years in a high-security prison for telling children about their belief in a man called Jesus.

And then there’s Kirti, who is being continually hounded by a violent mob, her body repeatedly broken and battered by their sheer anger at her refusal to deny her faith.

These stories are an afront to the comforting habit one may have of disassociating individual realities from vast statistics.

These stories don’t give their readers the blissful luxury of ignorance. They are an afront to the comforting habit one may have of disassociating individual realities from vast statistics, of regarding this epidemic of violence as some sort of faceless or nameless phenomena.

Rather, readers are brought face-to-face with the detail of religious persecution. We are shown the thought-processes of a man on the brink of death, we are walked through the moment-by-moment decisions of a person attempting to flee for their life, we are exposed to the agony of three women being separated from their children.

The writing is heart-wrenchingly powerful, the stories its telling, infinitely more so. This is certainly not your average ‘coffee-table book.’

As well as the written stories, there are photographs of these persecuted individuals dotted through-out the book. Readers are not only told their stories, they are also shown their faces. These pictures serve to remind us that this discrimination isn’t happening to people who resemble cinematic-style heroes, it is happening to husbands, wives, daughters, sons, neighbours, friends, mothers, fathers.

2023 is the most dangerous year to be a Christian on record, it is integral to the increasing number of people who are losing their right to hold their beliefs that this reality is continually, and indeed creatively, amplified.

And yet, as noted earlier, the darkness of these stories is not devoid of glimmers of light. There is a distinct thread of redemption that is weaved through this resource, and indeed, these people’s lives. The beauty is found in the forgiveness shown by those who have been betrayed, the hope found by those who have nothing else to hold onto, the ‘gentle, defiant glow’ of those who are stubborn in their selflessness – all of it all the more staggering for being completely true.

This book presents its readers with a costly kind of goodness. A truly counter-cultural form of beauty. If you sit with it long enough, it will begin to chip away at the modern and ever-so-Western tendency we have to consider pain and beauty as forces that are mutually exclusive.

Art, in its various forms, is one of the most powerful tools we humans have, and that is never more evident than when it is used to communicate circumstances with a depth that statistics alone could never reach. Clay and Canvas is certainly one such example.

Clay and Canvas has been produced by Open Doors in Partnership with Something More Creative