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| © Patti Boyd |
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Around this period, Harrison gave Boyd her first serious camera, a Nikon F, and she began shooting portraits. "I took several photos of the group in India and then I discovered the images again many years later," she says. "But I didn't bring the camera out all that often with the Beatles, because I didn't want to be invasive. I sensed not to take advantage of the situation I was in."
She did make an evocative picture of George reclining in India that she calls "the last time I saw him looking so calm and relaxed." Within a year, the Beatles would be facing business problems, internal bickering, and the interpersonal stress that eventually broke up the band.
The Harrisons' marriage, too, soon hit the rocks, due in part, Boyd says, to Harrison's infidelities and in part to the presence of a mutual friend: blues-guitar virtuoso Eric Clapton. "Eric and George had become close friends; they played, wrote music, and recorded together,"
Boyd recalls. "But I was aware that [Eric] found me attractive, and I enjoyed the attention he paid me."
This attention -- in the form of highly romantic letters, overtures, and most of the classic album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs -- eventually lured Boyd away from Harrison and into Clapton's arms. Even after Boyd married Clapton, the friendship between the two guitarists endured; they called each other "husband-in-law."
Boyd's relationship with Clapton, too, later soured. In her book, she partially blames his habitual infidelity and his alcoholism; in his own book -- Clapton: The Autobiography, he essentially agrees. As their marriage faltered, Boyd dated another photographer, Will Christie.
"I think musicians and photographers are fairly similar -- they like to get crazy," Boyd says with a laugh. "They hang onto the child within themselves longer probably than, say, men who are accountants or bankers. They have to remain young at heart in order to be creative."
After her divorce from Clapton, Boyd turned to her longtime hobby of photography as both a source of income and therapy. "The breakup of my marriage threw me," Boyd says. "Suddenly if I wasn't the famous Mrs. Eric, then who was I? I thought, 'I've got to get a job of some sort.' And then one day I thought, 'There's my camera smiling at me!'" She laughs. "'That's what I'll do.' So I started shooting in earnest. It was therapeutic."
Boyd took a private darkroom course, joined the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, and began shooting photo assignments for magazines such as Harper's Bazaar. To her chagrin, some publications she contacted wanted to make her into the story. "Once I thought I was seriously doing photos for a newspaper," she recalls. "And the bloody paper sends a photographer to shoot me at work! What's going on? I'm working -- I don't need to be photographed as well, bent over a Hasselblad, not an attractive look, you know, bum in the air!" She laughs. "But I enjoyed shooting: portraits, travel, whatever. Photography became my passion."
She still enjoys working in the darkroom and making prints, but she's also recently gone digital, documenting her travels with an eye toward future photo books.
Yet it's Boyd's pictures from her rock-and-roll past that have generated the most interest in the gallery world. Her exhibition Through the Eyes of a Muse debuted in San Francisco in 2005 and traveled to London, California, and New York. She hopes to arrange a show in Japan to coincide with a Japanese printing of her autobiography.
"I'd like to dig out more photographs and seriously go through what I have," she says. "Back in the day I took a lot of Polaroids, which are now in boxes, so they haven't seen daylight, and they're still in quite good shape."
She acknowledges the bittersweet memories. "Photography is so emotive," she says. "When you see a photo of somebody whose music you love or of when things were happening in your life, it just brings back the memory of a younger you -- of when you were really happy and doing well, when you were young. I do that too. I just think that photography is emotive, in the same way that music is."
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