Angus McBean knew that he knew how to please. Actors, he said, were terrified of having pictures taken, but 'the stars often get to know a photographer and to trust him, and thank goodness that photographer is often me!' He took two photographs of the Beatles looking down a stairwell at EMI - neatly coiffed in 1963, hairy in 1969 - so the curator of Angus McBean: Portraits (at the National Portrait Gallery until 22 October) turned to Paul McCartney to explain that trust. But McCartney can't have been as star-like as Gielgud, say, or Marlene Dietrich, or so intimate with his own profile - nor was he so demanding that a photo session became a duel or a duet. In an interview with McCartney, 33 lines of question from Terence Pepper (the curator) elicit only 17 lines of laconic response: 'We knew nothing about his previous work, but he struck us as a very amiable, slightly eccentric kind of guy.'

LRB 3 August 2006 | PDF Download