“Paul and Linda McCartney met in 1967 at London’s Bag O’ Nails club, just as The Beatles were reaching their creative peak. Linda, a rising rock photographer from New York, quickly bonded with Paul over music and art. Their connection was instant, blooming into one of pop culture’s most enduring love stories.” “They married on March 12, 1969, in a modest ceremony at Marylebone Town Hall in London. As The Beatles were unraveling, Paul found peace with Linda, retreating to a quiet farm in Scotland. There, they raised their family and formed Wings, creating hits like ‘My Love’ and ‘Band on the Run.'” “Throughout the 1970s, the couple was often photographed in candid, carefree moments—on tour, at home, or exploring the countryside. Linda’s quiet strength and creative spirit shaped Paul’s post-Beatles life, offering both stability and inspiration. Their love lasted until her passing in 1998, forever captured in those warm, vintage frames.”

Linda Eastman was the award-winning photographer who captured a generation of rock stars before marrying a Beatle. He discusses how her work changed his life

always used to joke that I ruined Linda’s career,” says Paul McCartney, sitting on a sofa in his office in Soho, London, with a selection of his late wife’s photographs spread on the table before him. “She became known as ‘Paul’s wife’, instead of the focus being on her photography. But, as time went on, people started to realise that she was the real thing. So, yeah, she eventually did get the correct reputation, but at first it was just blown out of the water by the headline-grabbing marriage.”

He has a point. Before she met and married him, in March 1969, Linda Eastman was an award-winning photographer. Born in 1941 and raised in a suburb of New York, she had studied under Hazel Archer – who taught the artist Robert Rauschenberg, among others – and was the first woman to shoot a Rolling Stone cover, featuring Eric Clapton. Her speciality was capturing pop stars in unguarded moments: a tearful Aretha Franklin; Jimi Hendrix mid-yawn; Janis Joplin backstage, her bottle of Southern Comfort already drained. But marriage to a Beatle tended to overshadow your own work and reputation, as Yoko Ono discovered.

It wasn’t until years later that her talent was reappraised: 1976’s unassumingly titled book Linda’s Pictures was the first in a series of collections of her work. If anything, her reputation has grown since her death in 1998 – The Linda McCartney Retrospective, at Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow, is just the latest global exhibition of her work. It was curated by McCartney, along with their daughters, Mary and Stella; here, he picks six of his favourite photographs. “As you can probably tell,” he says, after an exhaustive account of one of the McCartneys’ family holidays in Orkney in the early 70s, “I like talking about this stuff.”