original Zint

Last week my mother got her old photo albums out so we could compare Harley as a baby to us lot when we were small. We came to a photo and my mother goes, "Oh, that's Guenter Zint; you know, the guy who photographed the Beatles?" It turns out he and my dad were friends at the time. Cool.



On our way 'home': Zint with my mum, me and my brother, waiting for our ship in the migration hall in Bremerhaven, Germany in '71. He'd just helped drive us to the port and was seeing us off to Fremantle, Australia.

I asked my father about him and he said:

"We met in Munich in the late Fifties when I was a cadet with the news agency dpa [deutsche presse agentur] and Zint was being trained as a press photographer by them. He worked for Der Spiegel magazine later and photographed lots of leftwing demos, was kicked to the ground by police and is said to have converted to socialism at that time. We re-met in Hamburg when I worked there for dpa in the mid-Sixties. He had an English girl friend, Ada, lived in a commune and had taken to photographing the appearances of an obscure band called The Beatles in a Hamburg nightclub. Things sort of progressed from there...
"We came into contact again by e-mail recently, he lives near Bremen in a sort of extended family with Ada, another woman he has since married, and children from at least two marriages (but none from Ada).
"Zint and his firm Panfoto have a huge archive of contemporary social and societal images, which helps him make ends meet - I mean, there's always someone needing a pic of Reeperbahn floozies, Beatle maniacs and so on."

The Panfoto site is here, and here's a site with some of his iconic rock photos - the Doors, the Stones, Hendrix, Tim Buckley, and more.