In news that should make the ears of Beatles fans everywhere perk up, six rare photographs of the band from their iconic Abbey Road album cover shoot are to be auctioned for an estimated US$100,000 or more, according to auction house Bloomsbury Auctions.
They were taken by photographer Iain Macmillan, a friend of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, on 8 August 1969 with a Hasselblad medium format camera.
Macmillan had only several minutes to shoot and captured six frames, with three showing the band walking from left to right, and the other three showing them walking in the opposite direction.
Although there were 25 sets of signed prints made, they were mostly passed around among collectors as individual photographs. The auction marks the first time that a full set of the six images will be going on sale.
Bloomsbury Auctions previously sold one of the “opposite direction” photographs in 2012.
A picture of the street sign that was used for the back cover will be auctioned off along with the six photographs.
The images will go under the hammer on 21 November 2014, and are expected to fetch between £50,000 to £70,000, or US$80,000 to US$112,000.
One of the outtake photographs from the shoot
The fifth of the six shots taken. This is the photograph chosen for the album cover
The street sign that was used for the back cover
[via PetaPixel, images by Iain Macmillan/Bloomsbury Auctions]