At first, flush with unimagined fame and fortune, they were seemingly happy to play to the cameras. We now know that the grueling schedule of touring and the glare of constant publicity turned the dream into a near nightmare, particularly for John and George. George it was who, on August 29 1966, after what turned out to be their final official concert, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, announced to the others that he would rather leave the group than continue to go through the motions of performing for thousands of screaming fans. Neither the fans nor the Beatles themselves could hear what was being played, and the whole business of live appearances had become thoroughly irksome.

Having made the decision to stop touring, and feeling, no doubt, a great weight lifted from their shoulders, the Beatles then spent the next few months focusing their attention on individual projects. Paul turned his hand to writing the score for the film The Family Way, John went off to shoot How I Won the War in Germany and Spain, and George flew to Bombay to further his increasingly serious interest in Indian music and philosophy. It was through him that the other Beatles were introduced to Transcendental Meditation and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. In February 1968, the Beatles traveled to the Maharishi's Academy in Rishikesh, India. Although a private event, the Beatles' visit was recorded in limited newsreel footage together with photographs taken by a few individuals at the academy who, like Paul Saltzman, suddenly found themselves rubbing shoulders with arguably the most famous men of the periodóand this at a time when opportunities for photographing two or more of the group together were increasingly rare. In more than a decade of dealing with Beatles memorabilia, I have been privileged to see many of these photographs.

Several years ago, Paul Saltzman arrived in my office, inquisitive as to whether his pictures would be of interest to collectors. With the two of us hunched over a light box, he laid out transparencies that had remained essentially unseen for nearly thirty years and I well remember the impact those images had. It was difficult to believe they had been taken so long ago, the colours were so vibrant and the overall quality was such that I was surprised to learn that Paul was not a professional. Some of the shots are the best I have seen, not only of this particular event, but of the many informally taken pictures of the group through the 1960s that have surfaced over the years.

Looking at them again, I find the most striking images to be those of John Lennon and Paul McCartney with their guitars. Sunburnt and unshaven, they look relaxed and happy, quite at ease in front of Paul Saltzman's camera. These pictures would seem to contradict the generally held idea that they had all but given up on collaboration in their songwriting by this date. The intimacy of these frames is quite remarkable and the photos perfectly capture perhaps the most positive aspect of this Indian interlude: a newfound burst of creativity. In these few months, away from distractions and commitments back home, John, Paul, and George composed most of the songs for what would be the next album, entitled simply The Beatles but universally known as The White Album, eventually released in November of that year.

Ultimately, these portraits of John and Paul have a poignancy, recording as they do a partnership that was to be pulled apart by the tensions that crystallized in the months following the Beatles' return to England. Despite the steadily disintegrating relationships within the group, the Beatles still managed to record three albums and continued to have number-one hits. Finally, almost two years exactly after the Indian trip, on April 10, 1970, Paul McCartney announced that the group had officially split up.

The publication of Paul Saltzman's photographs is to be welcomed by both fans and historians of the Beatles alike, for these images provide a significant addition to the detail of what is a relatively little-recorded episode in the career of the most important rock group the world has known.