New York City - As a long-haired, British 15-year-old, now-famed photographer and philanthropist Tom Murray thought he would be a painter. However, his artistic aspirations were bogged down by two immutable obstacles: he could not draw - "I was doing stick figures long before Lowry was," he claims - and he lacked the attention span necessary for watching paint dry.

According to Murray, "the whole process took too long." But something about the instantaneous click of the shutter, and the relationship of trust between photographer and subject, gripped him knee-deep into the emerging medium. Nine years later, following a tour-de-photo-force throughout Africa, three World Press Awards for theatrical photography, and the impromptu tutelage of Lord Snowdon, Murray found himself as the lead photographer of London's The Sunday Times Colour Magazine. And on a warm Sunday morning in May of 1968, when the new appointee was asked to photograph an anonymous pop group for an upcoming issue, young Tom had not even the slightest inclining that he would be spending a sunny afternoon with a gaggle of cultural icons - the yellow-submarine-driving, Penny-Lane-courting, strawberry-fields-strolling musical zeitgeists themselves - The Beatles.


Armed with but two rolls of color film, one lens, and a single camera - bereft of a lighting kit and photo assistants - Murray jumped into his red Jaguar to greet the band at their rehearsal space. It was not until he heard "Lady Madonna" being played on the piano that the reality of the situation set in. His reaction:

"Holy [expletive], is this the group?"

Indeed it was. With Paul McCartney at the piano, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, John Lennon and Yoko Ono sipping coffee in the background, Murray set out for a whirlwind afternoon with the famous band, capturing their fun-filled antics at a number of London's scenic locales. Murray even caught a picture of Lennon staging his own death on the St. Katharine docks, 12 years prior to his impending assassination. The image would later become a finalist for the cover of Time Magazine in 1980, until editors deemed it "too spooky" for publication.

At the end of the shoot, with his two rolls of film in hand, his mother asked him how the whole ordeal played out. "It was mad day," he said, and hence the title of this iconic photo series was born - "Mad Day Out: Summer of '68." At the advice of famous American photojournalist, Eve Arnold, Murray selected his favorite 23 images from the series, and locked them in a drawer "for his future retirement pension," letting slip the occasional photo for charity auctions and benefit galas. Over the course of the past 42 years, the illustrious images have raised over $2.5 million for charities such as the Make a Wish Foundation, Friends in Need, Project Angel Food, and The Richard Caron Foundation.

"That's a lot of money for an old fart like me," he says.


This past week, however, the "Mad Day Out" series of 23 photographs of The Beatles have been released courtesy of Rock Paper Photo, an online gallery for the best in pop-cultural fine art, that allows fans to order archive-quality, hand-signed, printed images of their favorite musical legends. Alongside the likes of Hendrix, Jagger, and Joplin, Tom Murray's spontaneous rendering of The Beatles is the perfect addition to the collection of any classic rock zealot.

The Beatles' photo shoot is only a single component to a career that spans decades, including portraiture, architecture, fashion, film, and theatre photography. One year following his "Mad Day," in 1969, Tom Murray became the youngest photographer to be commissioned by the Royal Family at age 25, capturing scandalously-casual moments of Her Royal Highness, Princess Margaret. Working alongside photo-greats like Snowdon, as well as Helmut Newton, Norman Parkinson, and Guy Bourdin, Murray's work has appeared in countless international publications, from GQ, French Vogue, to The New York Times, among others. Some of his best-loved subjects include Anjelica Huston, Elizabeth Taylor, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, and Ralph Lauren. Currently, Murray is sifting through thousands of unpublished prints, in the process of creating a bound anthology of his oeuvre.

In his own words, Murray's visual aesthetic is "narcissistic," infused with "preconceived ideas" of soft-lit glamorous women, and harsh-looking, distinguished men. But perhaps the essence of his successful career is his love of interaction with people, and the sentiment of trust he induces between the camera lens and the foreground. According to Murray, "Much of photography is observation, talking these personalities to death. Somewhere around the second roll of film, they stop showing me their famous face, and suddenly, the real person comes up. It's about trust."

About Rock Paper Photo
Rock Paper Photo lies at the intersection of sophisticated fine art and accessible limited-edition collectability. With an extensive inventory of images numbering in the thousands, the company works only with a carefully curated collection of photographers and participates intimately in the production process in order to assure the highest quality result. Its unframed and framed prints, offered in Silver Gelatin, Archival Chromogenic, Archival Pigment and Platinum.