Fake “rare” photos withdrawn from auction

The Daily Mail recently became the laughing stock of Beatles fans when they printed this story about someone auctioning what the paper described as “a treasure trove of hitherto unseen Beatles photos”. But the story spread elsewhere all over the internet, and no one had bothered to do any proper research.

According to the story in the Daily Mail, the photos “were taken by
Derek Cooper over a 13 year period and feature the Fab Four in their
days starting out at Liverpool’s Cavern Club up to their acrimonious
break up in 1970.”

Ridiculous.

Of course, as any follower of the Beatles can see, the photos from the developed film only shows that someone has used a roll of black and white film to capture other, some rather famous, photos of the Beatles, taken by people like Robert Whitaker, Dezo Hoffman and others. It seems these phony prints have been around for a while, too.

The only “rare” thing about these photos is that some of the ones we are used to see in colour, are reproduced in black and white. This also includes the four individual portraits of John, Paul, George and Ringo that were given away with “the White album” back in 1968 and in all further editions of the album.

Sadly however, the trend of “cut-and-paste-journalism” spread the rubbish story all over the world like gospel.

Anyway, the story took another twist yesterday, when the collection was withdrawn from the auction, according to amateurphotographer.co.uk.

We hope it was because someone has alerted the auction house about the true identity of these photos.