Astrid Kirchherr

Astrid Kirchherr – Photographic studies with Reinhard Wolf in Hamburg

Astrid Kirchherr was born in Hamburg on 20 May 1938. As a child, she experienced Hamburg’s devastation in the final stages of the Second World War and later vividly remembered the view of the bodies on her flight to the Baltic Sea. After graduating from school, Astrid Kirchherr wanted to study fashion design and thus attended the Master School for Fashion, Textiles, Graphics and Advertising in Hamburg (today the Design Department of the Faculty of Design, Media and Information at the University of Applied Sciences) and during her studies, discovered black-and-white photography and demonstrated a considerable talent in this field. Her photography teacher Reinhard Wolf suggested changing courses and offered her the prospect of an assistant position in his studio. Kirchherr sympathised with the youthful existentialists, the ‘exis’ as John Lennon later called them with friendly derision. In retrospect, she viewed this time as a childish experimental phase in black clothes without a deeper understanding of the philosophy of Sartre.

Astrid Kirchherr – The inventor of the Beatles’ haircut

In October 1960, Astrid Kirchherr, her former boyfriend - the musician Klaus Voormann - and her fellow photographer Jürgen Vollmer, visited the Hamburg music club Kaieserkeller where they met the still largely unknown Beatles in their original line-up with both ‘fifth Beatles’, Pete Best on drums and Stuart Sutcliffe on electric bass. Kirchherr fell in love with Sutcliffe and made friends with the Beatles. She was immediately fascinated with their new type of music and wanted to be part of it. To this end, she organised professional photo shoots for the band, which was not usual at that time, and cut the young musicians their first mushroom head haircuts, a look that would become characteristic for the band. Kirchherr herself denied having created the Beatles-Look, and explained that the mushroom haircut was widespread in her art school at that time. Despite this, George Harrison attested to the young German having created a significant part of the Beatles’ image and Paul McCartney dedicated the song Baby’s in Black to her.

Early career end and lasting legacy

Astrid Kirchherr saw Sutcliffe as the greatest love of her life and was inconsolable when he died in her arms from a brain haemorrhage in 1962. The photo she took of George Harrison and John Lennon mourning their friend on his roof became famous. Together with her colleague Max Scheler, she photographed the filming of the fictional documentary film (‘mockumentary’) Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! For Stern magazine, directed by Richard Lester. After marrying the drummer Gibson Kemp, she retired largely from public life, but in the 1980s, Kirchherr began marketing her extensive photo archive, attended fan-meetings and published several high-quality illustrated books. In 2011, her archive was acquired by an American investor family for an unknown sum.

Astrid Kirchherr died in her hometown of Hamburg on 12 May 2020.