The four, at the first

Harry BENSON didn’t want to be a glorified groupie. He photographed political events and natural disasters and political campaigns. In January 1964, he’d just been in Africa, capturing the upheaval that attended the end of colonialism. “I thought of myself as an important journalist,” he says in a thick Scottish brogue. Indeed, Benson was on staff at Life magazine in the 1970s, and his pictures can still be found in the New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

But back then, in his early 30s, Benson was a freelance photographer. And like all freelancers, he needed the dough. So on that late evening in 1964 when an editor from the British newspaper the Daily Express asked him to shoot a pop group that was attracting attention, he lowered his standards. “I didn’t want to shoot any rock groups,” Benson, now 74, says on the telephone from his home in Palm Beach, Fla. “But it was the best forced assignment I ever had.”

The group was the Beatles, as it turned out, and the assignment would forever link Benson to the band, much to his delight. “There are a lot of things I would want to do over again in my career, but the Beatles aren’t one of them,” he says. Because Benson owns all of his images, he’s been able to license and sell his Beatles shots, providing a steady income for him and his wife, Gigi. Such are the happy accidents of shooting an incipient global phenomenon.

Despite his reservations about shooting something as frivolous as “a bunch of teen idols,” Benson was blown away by the band’s sharp-witted intelligence. “They were very serious, very smart and knew a lot about politics,” he says. “And they were very quiet. They spoke in whispers.”

Given total access to the band, Benson shot countless rolls of film in Paris. He followed the Beatles back to London, where their album “With the Beatles” had shot to No. 1 on the record charts, and then on to New York, where they were met by throngs of screaming well-wishers at Kennedy Airport for their first trip to the United States. Beatlemania had taken hold. That shot of the Fab Four on the airport tarmac, waving and smiling? It’s Benson’s.

Benson’s photographs taken in the first months of 1964, when the Beatles exploded onto the world stage, remain some of the best-known and beloved images of the band, which had swiftly moved from the dank nightclubs of Hamburg, Germany, to become the biggest rock band on the planet. Benson’s shots of the Beatles soaking up the veneration with wide-eyed wonder are the definitive images of Beatlemania, phase one, before the “Sgt. Pepper” years.

Sixty-seven of these images have been collected in a recently published book called “Once There Was a Way ... Photographs of the Beatles.” More than two-dozen of those photos are now on display at the Apex gallery in Los Angeles, part of a traveling exhibition that will stop in New York, Florida, Dallas and Santa Fe, N.M.

Benson’s Beatles pictures capture the guileless exuberance of that first flush of fame, when the four members still allowed some candor to peek through. Here they are engaged in a hotel room pillow fight, acting servile with Ed Sullivan, mugging it up with Cassius Clay in Miami. “They wanted no part of Clay, because they thought Sonny Liston was going to knock him out!” says Benson.

Over time, Benson became intimate friends with the band members, who confided their trepidation about the fleeting nature of their renown. “They all thought it was a big zip-up,” says Benson, who shot the band periodically during the next two years. “They gave it 15 months at the most. John Lennon’s attitude was, take it while it lasts.”

Benson, who was backstage during performances on “The Ed Sullivan Show” that were seen by more than 70 million Americans, remembers the band being nervous and deferential toward the TV legend. “It was ‘Yes, Mr. Sullivan, no, Mr. Sullivan,’ ” he says. “They wanted so badly for it to go well.”

But even by 1966, during his last shoots with the band, Benson detected changes in the group dynamic engendered by its unprecedented success. “George Harrison withdrew, and became reclusive; so did Ringo,” he says. “Paul was all show business and wanted to control the limelight. The band would get into fights about the silliest little things.”

The Beatles continued to record and broke up in 1970. By that time, Benson had stopped photographing them, but his relationship with the band always remained cordial and professional. “It remained a friendly, healthy situation,” says Benson. “If they stepped out of line, I would’ve zapped them!”

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Where: Apex Fine Art,

152 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles

When: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.

Ends: Feb. 21

Price: Free

Info: (323) 634-7887