Exhibit Captures the Beatles’ ‘60s Look : ‘Historic Images’ Show at Lahaina Galleries in Newport Beach Is Handsome but Lightweight

When I was 9, I made some extra record money selling Beatles trading cards and magazine photos from a cardboard refrigerator box set up in my family’s Buena Park carport. Though a handsomely inflated profit was made on them--I had overhead, OK?--I never imagined that one day several of the same photos would be hanging in an upscale Newport gallery, framed and priced up to $900 apiece.

Fortunately, the late Dezo Hoffmann’s shots of the Fab Four lend themselves quite well to both bubble-gum cards and the walls of Fashion Island’s Lahaina Galleries, where “The Beatles: Historic Images 1962-67” exhibit runs through Monday.

The Czech-born photographer, who died in 1986, made his name as a photojournalist, covering Mussolini’s grisly invasion of Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War and World War II. He had settled into doing celebrity portraits when he was drafted into covering another breed of invasion: Beatlemania.

Nearly anyone who pointed a camera at the Beatles managed to capture some of their magic, freshness and irreverent spirit, but Hoffmann seemed particularly attuned to it. The look of his posed shots added to their status as the most highly stylized social phenomenon of this half of the 20th Century.

Hoffmann worked with the Beatles from the 1962 days of their Liverpool fame through their mid-’60s world conquest and the psychedelic era through their breakup in 1970. All but seven of the exhibit’s 50 shots are from 1965 or earlier--the peak of Beatlemania. Some of the giddy hysteria that greeted them must have been in reaction not only to the group’s undeniable talent, but to the grim times that immediately preceded them: the Profumo scandal in Britain and the still-unsettling Kennedy assassination stateside.

Hoffmann’s images show the Beatles as an ideal antidote to that, full of innocence and vitality as they were. While a capable portrait artist, it is his candid shots that best capture the group’s spirit. In one of his recording studio photos, the look on John Lennon’s face reveals the creative engines turning in his mind. Other studio candids show a rapture on the four faces as they share a song, and you can practically see the musical sparks flying between them.

Several of the photos hold a historical significance, preserving their first recording session in 1962; their debut American press conference where, with a cocky assurance, they faced a new continent and a thicket of microphones, and their Ed Sullivan appearances.

Some of Hoffmann’s best shots aren’t in the exhibit, however. Among the missing are his brilliantly composed shots of their return to England after conquering America, where they deplaned to a crowd of thousands gathered to welcome them. Also missing is an artful shot taken of the stage floor at a U.S. show, showing it to be littered with the jelly beans fans heaped on them after Paul McCartney had innocently announced that the group liked them.

Instead of such content, the prints at the Lahaina exhibit seem rather to have been chosen for their readily salable features, namely pretty faces and a piece o’ history, which in most cases is sufficient.

The quality of the prints does sometimes leave a bit to be desired. With numbered runs of between 3,500 and 5,000 copies per print, the Australian lab handling the job evidently can’t be bothered with burning in even the most overly bright spots, losing detail in places.

The Lahaina Galleries, with other branches in Hawaii and San Francisco, opened last year on the ocean side of Fashion Island. It generally specializes in “ooh and ahh” art, such as high-tech glass sculptures and Robert Lyn Nelson’s new age aqua-scapes, leading one to suspect Lahaina may mean “big gift shop” in Hawaiian.

* “The Beatles: Historic Images 1962-67,” through May 25 at Lahaina Galleries, 1173 Newport Center Drive, Newport Beach. Hours: 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., Monday through Saturday; 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., Sunday. Free. (714) 721-9117.