Hamburg: Jager-Passage Wohlwillstrasse 22.

These photos of John peering out of a Hamburg doorway as the spectral, see-through figures of Paul, George and Stu Sutcliffe move towards him are a pretty good argument for traditional photography. Everything about them reeks of a distant, long gone time and place. Familiar the images may be, but I've always found them haunting, and wondered where exactly they were taken. Well, the answer is Jager-Passage Wohlwillstrasse 22, and the doorway is still there. The pics here were part of a sequence, and you can see all of them and a lot more besides at the Savage Young Beatles site (there's a link under Friends & Neighbours). Also worth a look is Bill Hillman's Beatles' Hamburg site (again a link to the right). Jurgen Vollmer, who took the pics, asked John to provide some spiel in 1975: "(He) was the first photographer to capture the beauty and spirit of the Beatles (tho I say it myself)!" I'd say Astrid did that too - but fair enough. There is an interestingly dark quality to all the great Beatles in Hamburg photos - prescient, slightly unsettling but utterly fantastic. Or something like that, anyway.