Love Story

By Barry Owens
POSTED NOVEMBER 2, 2007

It was 1980 and Allan Tannenbaum was a photographer for the Soho Weekly News, a now defunct newspaper that covered the downtown art scene. The pay was low, but the assignments plum—few more so than photographing Yoko Ono, which he did in his Tribeca loft on Duane Street, for the cover.

The story was to be “Yoko Only,” a feature on the artist that did not involve her husband, John Lennon. But the photographs Tannebaum eventually made of the couple (Lennon was lured into the project during an additional session at the Dakota) made far more than the cover of a downtown newspaper.

You have seen some of these iconic images. They were captured just weeks before Lennon’s death. There is the couple walking through Central Park, or seated on a bench in what would later be called Strawberry Fields, or standing in front of the Dakota, berets pulled down tight.

What you may not have seen are the more intimate photos Tannenbaum took, and which he has included in his book “John & Yoko: A New York Love Story” (Insight Editions, $45). More than half of the photographs have never been published before.

Among them are the couple undressing on a film set, where they simulated lovemaking for the cameras. Just as intimate are those moments Tannenbaum captured when the couple was fully clothed. The expression on Lennon’s face as he tunes in a song on the radio is transporting.

“He looks like a teenager finding a new song on the radio that he liked,” says Tannenbaum. In another, Lennon seems pensive and looks his age, 40, as he smokes a cigarette during a break.

The book includes Tannenbaum’s written impressions of the session. “The scenes built up such an emotional intensity that John, with his characteristically wry humor, would occasionally break the tension with a joke,” he writes.

Tannenbaum brought proofs from Ono’s cover shoot to the Dakota, and Lennon was impressed. He said they had “really captured her beauty.”

Tannenbaum continued to photograph Ono after Lennon’s death, but he says she was reluctant at first to give her blessing to the book’s publication. After repeated visits, she finally warmed to the idea and contributed a forward, which she first read aloud to him in her kitchen.

It reads, in part: “Thank you, Allan, for being there at the last chapter of our life together, and capturing the way we were."

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