Pattie Boyd at a book signing in Cambridge 21 April 2023. Photographed with a Ricoh GR III at ISO 800, 1./10 second at f2.8. I held the camera at mid chest height and looked down estimating when the subject was properly in the frame. This is a crop, my wife is stood just to Pattie’s side.
After signing these two books (Tamara bought one for a close friend) Pattie got into an involved conversation with my wife. They got on like a house on fire, and I photographed the conversation on my iPhone.
And finally, a photo taken by the woman who was managing the queue for the book signing, taken on Tamara’s iPhone. Again a crop, and one that with the straight-on view looks most like the Pattie Boyd of fifty years ago.
Pattie Boyd’s entry on Wikipedia
Patricia Anne Boyd (born 17 March 1944) is an English model and photographer. She was one of the leading international models during the 1960s and, with Jean Shrimpton, epitomised the British female look of the era. Boyd married George Harrison in 1966, experiencing the height of the Beatles’ popularity and sharing in their embrace of Indian spirituality. She divorced Harrison in 1977 and married Harrison’s friend Eric Clapton in 1979; they divorced in 1989. Boyd inspired Harrison’s songs ” Need You”, “If I Needed Someone”, “Something” and “For You Blue”, and Clapton’s songs “Layla”, “Bell Bottom Blues” and “Wonderful Tonight”.
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Thanks for posting this, David! As you know from being there when I had the opportunity to talk with Pattie Boyd, it was first and foremost such an incredibly surreal moment for me. I was transported back to my teenage years, Beatlemania, and those decades of the Sixties and Seventies. Mary Quant, Carnaby Street that we’d read about avidly in the USA. And here I am now in my “advancing years,” living for decades in the UK.
Most of all, I was delighted by Pattie Boyd’s engagement with me on the personal level. She did not just sign like an automaton: She was engaged, actively listening to my comments, and then we got into real conversation. It was such a natural back and forth conversation.
I like her intelligent, down to earth attitude, and her plucky nature. She showed she cared for people through her answers during the interview for the Cambridge Literary Festival, and similarly for her comment to me about Mary Quant. She didn’t display any pretentiousness.
Thanks again for your fun, engaging photos. Much appreciated! 🌸
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It was a treat for me to see the two of you relate, and I agree about her – she was down to Earth enough to talk about clothes and freedom from the constrictions of the past. I remember her saying that she understood that her parents’ generation were in mourning for what had happened to so many in the war, but now it was time to cast off that pressure and just live.
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Awwww, glad it was “such a treat” to see the two of us talking! Yes, she was very much her own woman and enlightened about human nature. Yes, I too recall that comment about her parents’ generation and the pressures of wartime and the need to cast off that stress.
These days, the existential threat of the climate crisis is so real that reclaiming that more carefree time is rough. Although we did have our terrible realities too, like the Vietnam War.
I recall her answering someone’s question in the audience about how there were far fewer people, cars, stores, and things in London, and that too meant a very different ambiance in London.
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