The largest unseen collection of Beatles photography collected dust in a basement for over 40 years. It was only recently that photographer Henry Grossman '58 retrieved them from his archives for publication. How had so many pictures of such an international sensation been left untouched for decades? "I was always busy working," Grossman said.
Grossman is a photographer from New York City whose work has featured a large assortment of some of the most celebrated individuals alive, including members of the world-renowned band The Beatles of which he shot hundreds of photographs during the 1960s.
After attending a performing arts school for a year, Grossman transferred to the Metropolitan Vocational High School where he studied photography. Despite his early academic pursuits, he wasn't focused on developing photography into a career. "I expected to be an actor" he explained, "but I knew I needed a living between acting jobs."
Grossman came to Brandeis on a four-year Theater Arts scholarship. "My father died when I was 11-I could not have afforded to come to Brandeis had it not been for the scholarship," he said.
The skills and connections of the now-seasoned photographer were cultivated through a job he held working for Ralph Norman, the Brandeis campus photographer. The gig allowed him to take pictures of famous visitors the University hosted, including Russian artist Marc Chagall and and former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. "I was doing printing and developing, and eventually I ended up taking pictures of some of these famous people with students for Ralph," Grossman said.
He also got to photograph Eleanor Roosevelt because she had a monthly broadcast from Brandeis. The day John F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for president he came to be on her show, giving Grossman an opportunity to take a headshot of the future president, which was then used by JFK's team in the campaign.
When asked whether Grossman ever felt starstruck during his engagements with iconic figures like Roosevelt and Kennedy, he plainly stated, "No, I appreciated who they were and what they had done." His comfort level with famous faces came in part because his father, Elias Grossman, was an etcher who did portraits of people such as Albert Einstein and Mahatma Ghandi. "His etchings hang in my living room," said Grossman.
In 1958 he went on a Brandeis archaeological expedition for six months to Iran and Israel. He returned to the states in December and acted in New York for a semester before returning to Brandeis for a fellowship in the Graduate School of Anthropology. Throughout his graduate studies he continued to take photographs on campus.
Grossman left Brandeis with an impressive list of names. "I made up a three-page three-column single-spaced list of a lot of the famous people I photographed at Brandeis which, after four years, was long," he said. He was armed for the workforce with a list that would be noteworthy for an established photographer, let alone a student who did photography in his spare hours between classes and theater productions.
The young photographer approached various publications with his famous names in the hopes of landing work. They would tell him, "so-and-so isn't on your list but could you photograph them on an assignment for us." By accepting these, his assignments quickly grew in number with multiple publications including Life Magazine and TIME magazine.
In 1964, TIME magazine asked Grossman to cover the American Television debut of The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, a performance that began a four-year long photography relationship between Grossman and the "Fab Four."
Grossman was not a fan of The Beatles initially; his musical tastes rested solidly in opera and classical music. "I didn't know their music," Grossman explained. "I was there as a friend, I wasn't demanding anything of them ... I saw them as regular people having a lot of fun," Grossman said. After his run with the band was finished, more assignments piled on and the photos were pushed to the back of his mind.
But in 2006, Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan of Curvebender Publishing requested two photographs from Grossman for their first book, Recording the Beatles, a request that led them to discover Grossman's obscured collection of Beatles photographs numbering in the thousands.
Since then, Curvebender has published two books pertaining solely to Grossman's Beatles shots. The first, titled Kaleidoscope Eyes and released in 2008, was a collection of 250 photographs taken in the Abbey Road studios while the band was recording music for the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
This year, a second book of photographs titled Places I Remember: My Time With The Beatles was made available for purchase. "The current book weighs around 15 pounds," said Grossman. The book contains over 1,000 images that offer a perspective into the musicians' private lives that could only be captured by someone who knew them on a personal level.
Grossman's unique relationship with The Beatles may be unlike the ones with many of his photography subjects at Brandeis, but it does resemble the close connections he formed with his professors.
"I made so many great friends at Brandeis," Grossman recalled. He was especially affected by his relationship with physics Prof. Herman Epstein (BIPH) who taught an introductory course on physical science. "[Epstein] would say 'I want you to get one thing out of this class and that's the scientific method-how to ask questions,'" said Grossman.
Grossman also discussed how a theater instructor encouraged him to be more outgoing. He said, "I wrote in a theater essay about a play I acted in that I didn't think a particular person had been forthcoming in a scene, so I had nothing to react to. The professor wrote in the margins of my paper, 'By what right did you feel she had to be the one to open up and extend herself.'"
In between his photography jobs, he pursued a number of acting opportunities. He played Ernst Schmidt in the Broadway production of Grand Hotel from 1989 to 1992, to the surprise of many of his colleagues who knew him in the context of shooting Broadway plays as opposed to being cast in them.
While his acting opportunities have slowed down, Grossman is still a busy photographer. The key to a long and successful career like Grossman's comes from relating on a "personal, rather than on a technical level," as he described it. His advice to aspiring photographers: "Watch and keep your ears open. Don't try to interject yourself into the scene."