Reel Art Press snaps up ‘deluxe visual treasure trove’ of Pattie Boyd photos and stories

Reel Art Press has announced it will publish Pattie Boyd: My Life in Pictures this autumn, “a deluxe visual treasure trove" featuring 300 photographs and artworks from Boyd’s intimate archive for the first time.

Editor Dave Brolan acquired world all language rights directly from Boyd.

A model, photographer and “one of the most iconic muses of the 20th century”, as well as the former wife of Beatle George Harrison and Eric Clapton, Boyd was at the epicentre of the London music and pop-culture scene in the 1960s and 1970s, famously being the inspiration for Harrison’s “Something” alongside Clapton’s “Layla” and “Wonderful Tonight”.

Boyd’s love of photography developed around the time of her marriage to Harrison and she documented their life together, and later her second marriage to Clapton, capturing a vast archive of images including of their close friends and contemporaries, including Twiggy, David Bailey, Mick Jagger, Billy Preston and The Beatles. 

Boyd’s archive also includes letters from her marriages and from friends, including John and Yoko, diary entries, artefacts and artworks, the original “Layla” album cover painting by Émile Frandsen. It also features extensive photographs from her early modelling career, including Vogue and Vanity Fair.

It also includes portraits and photographs of Boyd taken by some of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, such as David Bailey, Eric Swayne, Terence Donovan, Robert Freeman and Robert Whitaker.

The “pictorial feast” of imagery in the book is accompanied by Boyd’s stories and recollections. Reel Art Press will publish the book in October 2022.