After Stu, I liked John and George. Then I like Pete Best. Paul I found hard to get close to.
Astrid Kirchherr
All my friends in art school used to run around with this sort of what you call Beatles haircut. And my boyfriend then, Klaus Voormann, had this hairstyle, and Stuart liked it very, very much. He was the first one who really got the nerve to get the Brylcreem out of his hair and asking me to cut his hair for him.
Black and white means photography to me. It's much easier to take a good color photograph, but you can get more drama into a black and white one.
Our post-war generation were struggling to escape the past and the burden of guilt we carried and to find a new way.
The most important thing I gave the Beatles was my friendship. They trusted me: there was no fear in being photographed.
I'm a very, very silly girl.
I was initially attracted to John when I first went to see them play. Then I got to know Stuart because he was John's best friend. Our hearts took over from there.
It is a serious job being a portrait photographer, which is how I saw myself.
We knew of Sartre and we dressed like the French existentialists. Our philosophy then, and remember we were only little kids, was more in following their looks than their thoughts. We were going around looking moody.
They are my friends. If they are the Beatles or the kings of China, it doesn't matter lo me.
For me, they are still my dear friends, not the Beatles.
John's legacy? His bravery. When he had the power, he used it. He really wanted peace on Earth, and John's lyrics, well, that's the brave poetry of the '60s. If he had stayed with us, he could have done so much more.
When I met the Beatles, they were wearing these funny little leather jackets, which inspired me. I had a suit made for myself out of fine, good black leather. It looked different. I was using leather but putting a different fashion angle on how it looked.
Stuart was a very special person and he was miles ahead of everybody. You know as far as intelligent and artistic feelings are concerned, he was miles ahead. So I learned a lot from him and because in the '60s we had a very strange attitude towards being young, towards sex, towards everything.
Well when you're young, you're just in love and every day is so new and so fresh and so beautiful. You just don't think of the future.
Well, the first time I met The Beatles was through my former boyfriend, Klaus Voormann, who saw them one night when he was wandering around Hamburg and then he heard this beautiful sound of rock 'n' roll music.
You couldn't buy any English authors or anything that came from America, like jeans. It was impossible. So we had to do our own clothes if we had weird ideas like wearing long scarves like the French people did. You had to knit them yourself.
And I was very, very much influenced by the films of Jean Cocteau and by Sartre and everything that came out of France because it was closer than America or England.
I was always introduced as the Beatles photographer and I gave it up in the end. I was so unsure of myself. Am I good or am I just the Beatles photographer? People were not interested in what I did before. I could not stand it any more.
I've hardly taken a photograph since 1967.
I'm not a businesswoman... I never looked after my negatives and you need that to prove you took the photographs.
For me, the music of the Beatles then was serious and very, very serious art. So I couldn't take a picture of John laughing his head off or pulling funny faces because he was a serious artist, even when he was only 20.
I always thought Stuart deserved a little bit of fame. He was a gifted artist and a very wonderful person.
I was wanting something new, and for me the Beatles were... outstanding. I was breathless, speechless.
You expressed yourself by looking different from other people. We even looked different from each other. But among the Exis, there was a close group of us, Klaus Voormann, Jurgen Wollmer and me. Klaus and I always wore black.
I didn't take that many pictures of The Beatles, but I did photograph them before anybody else knew about them, and that makes me proud. I saw something in them.
I just had the joy of taking pictures, and I never cared about my negatives. I just gave them away whenever anybody asked for them.
When Stuart passed away, I was so young and so selfish about living and having fun.
I have never met a man who I could still say, 'That is the love of my life.' Stuart is. I never met anybody as full of love and giving as this young man.
I love Liverpool and it is great to be back in the city.
I like to choose the people I take photographs of, but when you make your living off it, you've got to take everybody.
From the first time I saw them, I knew they weren't just five dirty little boys from Liverpool without an education.
