Camera in hand, Linda McCartney revealed life well beyond the Beatles

Though she was already a professional photographer when she first met Paul McCartney in 1967, the collection mainly spotlights what came after. It includes Linda’s striking black-and-white portraits of the Beatles and other music icons: a mischievous-looking Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin draped in white ostrich feathers, a smooth-faced Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton as he appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. Linda became the first female photographer to have her work featured on the magazine’s coveted front and later would have her pictures displayed in major galleries around the world.

Sharing wall space at the CCP — which famed Western photographer Ansel Adams helped to found — are lush English landscapes with Linda’s beloved Appaloosa, Lucky Spot, and dear Martha, the family sheepdog, as focal points. Her range of print techniques is also on display, from platinum and sun prints to instant Polaroids.

Most engaging are the images of the McCartneys doing what everyday people do. They hang out together, make faces, pose, pull stunts, laugh, hug. Such moments are rife in the dozens of snapshots that take visitors into the world they had created for themselves, recording the spontaneous antics of what became a family of six, the children and dad goofing around just like the rest of us.

Of course, they weren’t at all like the rest of us. The 176 photos were painstakingly assembled through a cross-continent collaboration by CCP curators Rebecca Senf and Meg Jackson Fox; Paul McCartney and daughter Mary, an established photographer and, like her mother, a vegetarian cookbook author; plus a London-based coterie of McCartney family archivists.

The care taken to tell Linda’s story about life, love and family struck Julianne Setiadi, a biomedical engineering student at the university who took in the exhibit for a second time in April.

“I wish I could have what they had,” Setiadi said. “To be able to spend your life with someone and share that level of intimacy is so rare. I’d like to someday experience that.”

Yet the exhibit, which opened in late February and closes Aug. 6, is also a reminder of what the family lost 25 years ago this month. Linda was 56 when she died of breast cancer at their ranch house a half-hour drive from Tucson’s city center.

Surrounded by vast wild acres of scrubland grasses and cactus, the ranch is where she, Paul and their children — Mary, Heather, Stella and James — enjoyed their privacy and the region’s legendary “sunsets on fire,” as Paul wrote for Wings, the band he and Linda formed after the Beatles split in 1970.

“Tucson was Linda’s place,” recalls Leonard Scheff, a retired attorney and longtime friend. He and his daughter, Stacy, were frequent guests at the house. He remembers dancing with Linda at a New Year’s Eve party where “Paul put on a tape of his latest recording.” As children, Stacy and Stella went to the local water works amusement park together.

“They felt at home here,” Scheff said of the McCartneys. He paused. “It was a long time ago.”

Linda’s Tucson roots and the deep relationship the McCartneys developed with the CCP are why the exhibit exists at all. A conversation with the family, facilitated by former center curator Peter MacGill — for many years, the president of the influential Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York — started everything rolling. Some 15,500 visitors had viewed the exhibit by mid-April. While this is billed as its North American debut, there are no plans to date for taking it to other cities.

“We love a Tucson story,” chief curator Senf said recently, “and we had an opportunity to show the inspiration a University of Arizona student had on photography.”

Born in Scarsdale, N.Y., Linda Eastman was an art history major at the University of Arizona in the mid-1960s. (Contrary to long-running rumors, she was not related to the Eastmans of Kodak fame.) Her passion for photography was stoked outside the university — she left before earning a degree — in classes taught by Hazel Larsen Archer, a transplant from North Carolina’s renowned Black Mountain College. Archer’s work, featuring portraits of composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham leaping in midair, is on display in conjunction with Linda’s.

“Hazel’s philosophy was ‘no cropping,’” Senf said. “And Linda never cropped a photo. She wanted to show that she was directly connected to what she saw.”

For Mary McCartney, curating the exhibit was about illustrating the range of her mother’s work, interests and techniques while also “encapsulating her artistic sensibility,” she explained via email from London.

“From looking at her portraits, you can tell that people liked to be photographed by her,” she noted. “She made you feel at ease. Not an easy task to take portraits, as I learnt myself! But I inherited my mother’s love for it.”

When Mary was considering photography as a career, she did what any prospective jobseeker might do: “I took mum for lunch and asked her lots of questions about how she had started out in photography. She told me about Arizona and how she found herself artistically there. The light, the desert open skies and the sense of freedom she felt there.”

Numerous images in the exhibit show the siblings together as well as individually. In one, Mary is behind a screen door, her dark silhouette barely illuminated. A similar self-portrait by Linda — a photo “mum took of her shadow” — remains special to her daughter.

It always catches her off-guard, Mary said. “When I look at it, I am convinced it is about to move, and she is going to walk out from behind the door.”

The Linda McCartney Retrospective Through Aug. 5 at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona at Tucson. ccp.arizona.edu.