The Beatles Posters We Keep Coming Back To

The Beatles generated an enormous amount of visual material, but the best posters do more than put four famous faces on a wall. They capture how quickly the band's image — and graphic culture around them — changed during the 1960s.

Richard Avedon's 1968 portraits

Avedon's psychedelic portraits of John, Paul, George and Ringo are among the most distinctive Beatles images of the period. Photography, colour treatment and pop graphics combine into something far stranger than a conventional band portrait.

They also work brilliantly as a set: four individual images that share a visual system without becoming repetitive.

Film posters show a different Beatles

A Hard Day's Night, Help! and Yellow Submarine each generated their own visual worlds. Original theatrical posters should be identified by country, format and release rather than treated as generic Beatles merchandise.

Promotional poster or later merchandise?

The band's imagery has been reproduced endlessly. A famous photograph does not make every poster using it a period original. Establish when the physical sheet was printed and what it was produced for.

Our music poster authentication guide explains the wider checks.

Why we like the Avedons

They sit between music, photography and graphic design, and they feel unmistakably of 1968 without looking like generic nostalgia. That is usually what we want from a great period poster: history you can see before you have read the label.

Explore our collecting guide for more on choosing originals.

Explore the posters featured above: John Lennon · Ringo Starr · Paul McCartney · George Harrison · The Beatles Help. You can also explore our collecting guide, authenticity guide, condition guide and framing guide.