Let It Be

The four portraits refuse symmetry, and that refusal is the whole point. These are not matching studio shots arranged for balance. Each Beatle sits in a different lighting, a different background, a different mood, and the grid forces them together only to expose how separate they are. The composition reads as documentary rather than promotional, a picture of individuals who happen to share a project.

At the top left, John Lennon is caught mid-word, mouth open, long hair falling around his face, his round glasses catching the light as he leans into a microphone whose grey mesh head fills the lower corner of his panel. It is the least flattering and most alive of the four images, a man in the act of singing rather than posing. Top right, Paul McCartney turns toward his own microphone against a wash of deep red, bearded, dark-haired, eyes lowered. His frame is warmer than the others, lit as if by stage light, and the microphone stand cuts diagonally across the bottom of the picture.

Bottom right, George Harrison is the only one smiling, head tilted, long hair swept back, teeth showing in something close to a laugh, an open-collared white shirt at his throat. His panel is the brightest and most relaxed, a jolt of warmth in a cover that is otherwise guarded. Bottom left, Ringo Starr appears in three-quarter profile, moustached, wearing a shirt patterned with small pale dots, his gaze aimed off-frame and slightly down. He looks thoughtful, self-contained, the quiet counterweight to George's grin diagonally across from him.

The typography works because it has to. The title is plain and confident, white capitals on black, and it needs nothing more because the rest of the sleeve is all face and darkness. The eye lands first on that white word, then drops into John's open mouth, then travels the grid clockwise through the four men before returning to the black that holds them apart. That black field is not empty space so much as distance, the design element doing the emotional labour.

Read as a whole, the sleeve states a plain truth about its subjects: four different lightings, four different backgrounds, four men most easily pictured one at a time. The austerity is the meaning. Where a conventional group cover stages togetherness, this one prints apartness, and it does so without a single line of explanation. That is what makes it work. The image withholds the reunion the eye expects and gives you separation instead, boxed and framed and sold.

The photographs came from Ethan Russell, who was the Beatles' photographer through the Let It Be period and whose images are bound up with the album. What is striking is how he refused to smooth things over, leaving four different moods and lightings rather than four matching portraits.

That separateness was not the original plan. When the album was still going to be called Get Back, the idea had been to recreate an earlier Beatles photograph taken in an EMI stairwell. To do it properly, Angus McBean, who had shot the original, was recalled at great expense to copy his own earlier picture. Then the idea was dropped. The stairwell reunion never made it to the released sleeve, and in its place came the four boxed portraits, a photograph of togetherness abandoned in favour of a photograph of apartness.

Comparatively little design effort went into the sleeve itself. The real work went into the accompanying boxed set and photo book, leaving the cover as a reduced arrangement of four frames and a title. The finished cover went out in 1970 on Apple Records, with the US pressing carrying the catalogue number AR 34001.

On the album's 1970 release, critics remarked on the cover's somber tone. Writing in The Sunday Times, Derek Jewell described the stark black sleeve as "a last will and testament, from the blackly funereal packaging to the music itself." In hindsight, the choice to photograph each Beatle in isolation is read as reinforcing the sense of the band's impending split, giving the sleeve added retrospective significance.

Part of what makes it endure is exactly that austerity. Black field, white title, four faces, nothing else. It is so reduced that it invites imitation, and although little design effort went into it, the four-frame portrait cover became as recognisable as the Beatles' other album covers. It has been copied and parodied endlessly by other artists and designers who borrow the four-panel grid and the stark black frame to say something of their own.

The template is instantly legible, which is why it travels so well across the decades since 1970: swap the four faces, keep the layout, and everyone knows the reference. What lingers is the contrast between the two versions of this cover that might have been, the staged reunion that was abandoned and the separation that was printed and sold.