Rodney Smith is the definitive record of the life’s work and worldview of a truly original artist. It maps Smith’s creative trajectory-including his introduction to photography, early personal projects, teaching, commissioned pieces, and career in fashion-and provides insight into his personal life and character, contextualizing his work and creative tendencies within his privileged but lonely upbringing and complex emotional and psychological makeup. This lavish volume features nearly two hundred reproductions of Smith’s images-many that have never before been published-and weaves together a biocritical essay by Getty Museum curator Paul Martineau and a technical assessment of Smith’s production by the Center for Creative Photography’s chief curator, Rebecca A. Eugene Smith, taught by Walker Evans, and devoted to the techniques of Ansel Adams, Smith was driven by the dual ideals of technical mastery and pure beauty.

Born in New York City, Smith started out as a photo-essayist, turned to portrait photography, and found his niche, and greatest success, in fashion photography. Mystery and manners, romance and fun-the sophisticated compositions and stylish characters in the extraordinary pictures of fashion photographer Rodney Smith (1947–2016) exist in a timeless world of his imagination. Handsomely designed, 1964: Eyes of the Storm creates an intensely dramatic record of The Beatles’ first transatlantic trip, documenting the radical shift in youth culture that crystallized in 1964. “Beatleland,” an essay by Harvard historian and New Yorker essayist Jill Lepore, describing how The Beatles became the first truly global mass culture phenomenon.

Candid recollections preceding each city portfolio that form an autobiographical account of the period McCartney remembers as the “Eyes of the Storm,” plus a coda with subsequent events in 1964.A personal foreword in which McCartney recalls the pandemonium of British concert halls, followed by the hysteria that greeted the band on its first American visit.Featuring 275 images from the six cities―Liverpool, London, Paris, New York, Washington, D.C., and Miami―of these legendary months, 1964: Eyes of the Storm also includes: Taken with a 35mm camera by Paul McCartney, these largely unseen photographs capture the explosive period, from the end of 1963 through early 1964, in which The Beatles became an international sensation and changed the course of music history.

''Millions of eyes were suddenly upon us, creating a picture I will never forget.'' -Paul McCartney

Saudek by Jan Saudek