Abbey Road

It is roughly 11:30 in the morning on 8 August 1969, and Iain Macmillan is balanced on a stepladder about ten feet above the middle of a London street, looking down through his viewfinder while a hired policeman holds back the cars. He has time for six frames. The Beatles stride across the zebra crossing, and one of those six exposures becomes the front of Abbey Road.

What you see is deceptively plain: four men walking right to left across the white bars of a crossing, framed by leafy trees and a wide, sunlit road that runs straight back to a pale blue sky. The composition is almost musical in its spacing. George Harrison leads in denim, head down. Paul McCartney follows in a dark suit, barefoot, out of step with the others. Ringo Starr strides in black with a formal stiffness, and John Lennon brings up the rear in a white suit, hair and beard catching the light. The line of them divides the frame cleanly; the eye lands first on that procession, then drifts up the empty road behind.

The everyday details are what make it breathe. A white Volkswagen Beetle is parked on the left kerb. A police van and other cars wait further up the right side. And there, on the far pavement between Lennon's and Starr's heads, stands a small figure in light clothing, an American tourist named Paul Cole, who wandered into the shot entirely by accident and was kept forever in the picture.

The staging wasn't improvised. A couple of days earlier Paul McCartney had handed Macmillan a sketch showing where and how the photograph should look, and Macmillan added his own drawing to lock down the layout. The shoot was deliberately set early, because the band usually rolled into the studio around two or three in the afternoon, and the earlier hour kept the fans away. Macmillan came into the project through a chain of introductions: Yoko Ono introduced him to John Lennon, and Lennon invited him to shoot the cover.

The man who turned this photograph into a sleeve was John Kosh, art director and designer, working as creative director at Apple. His boldest move was a subtraction. He left the front cover with no album title and no band name, nothing but the image. That nerve nearly cost him. EMI's chairman Joseph Lockwood phoned him in the middle of the night, irate, insisting nobody would have a clue what the record was. The next morning, Kosh recalled, George Harrison reassured him with the only argument that mattered: "We're the fucking Beatles."

The label proved unnecessary. There is no logo, no typography, no helpful caption anywhere on the front, and the picture needs none. Released in 1969 on Apple Records, it became one of the most recognisable rock photographs precisely because of how ordinary its setting is: a real crossing on a real road, four real people caught mid-stride.

There's a small coda. After the crossing shots, Macmillan walked to the corner of Alexandra Road to photograph an Abbey Road street sign for the back cover. A girl in a blue dress strolled through his frame and annoyed him, yet that very image, interruption and all, was the one chosen for the reverse. Both sides of the sleeve, then, owe their charm to people who simply happened to be there: a tourist who didn't know he'd be famous, and a passerby who spoiled a shot that nobody wanted to retake.