Astrid Kirchherr (born 20 May 1938) is a German photographer and artist, and is well-known for her association with The Beatles (along with her friends Klaus Voormann and Jürgen Vollmer) and her photographs of The Beatles while they were in Hamburg.
Kirchherr met artist Stuart Sutcliffe in the Kaiserkeller bar in Hamburg in 1960, where he was playing bass with The Beatles, and was later engaged to him before his untimely death in 1962.
Although Kirchherr admitted that she has taken very few photographs since 1967, her early work has been exhibited in Hamburg, Bremen, London, Liverpool, New York City, Washington, D.C., Tokyo, Vienna, and at the Rock `n` Roll Hall of Fame. Kirchherr has published three limited edition books of photographs.

EARLY LIFE
Astrid Kirchherr was born in 1938 in Hamburg, Germany, and is the daughter of a former executive of the German branch of the Ford Motor Company. During World War II she was evacuated to the safety of the Baltic Sea, where she remembered seeing dead bodies on the shore after the ships Cap Arcona and the SS Deutschland had been bombed and sunk, and the destruction in Hamburg when she returned. Following her father`s death she was raised by her mother, Nielsa Kirchherr, in Eimsbütteler Strasse in the wealthy Hamburg suburb of Altona.
After her graduation Kirchherr enrolled in the Meisterschule für Mode, Textil, Graphik und Werbung in Hamburg, as she wanted to study fashion design, but demonstrated a talent for black-and-white photography. Reinhard Wolf, the school`s main photographic tutor, convinced her to switch courses and promised that he would hire her as his assistant when she graduated. Kirchherr worked for Wolf as his assistant from 1959 until 1963.
In the late 1950s and early `60s Kirchherr and her art school friends were involved with the European existentialist movement, whose followers were nicknamed Exies by John Lennon. In 1995, she told BBC Radio Merseyside:
“ Our philosophy then, because we were only little kids, was wearing black clothes and going around looking moody. Of course, we had a clue who Jean Paul Sartre was. We got inspired by all the French artists and writers, because that was the closest we could get. England was so far away, and America was out of the question. So France was the nearest. So we got all the information from France, and we tried to dress like the French existentialists. ... We wanted to be free, we wanted to be different, and tried to be cool, as we call it now."

THE BEATLES
Kirchherr, Voormann, and Vollmer were friends who had all attended the Meisterschule, and shared the same ideas about fashion, culture and music. In 1960, after Kirchherr and Vollmer had had an argument with Voormann, he wandered down the Reeperbahn (in the St.Pauli district of Hamburg) and heard music coming from the Kaiserkeller club. Voormann walked in and watched a performance by a group called The Silver Beetles. Voormann asked Kirchherr and Vollmer to listen to this new music, and after visiting the Kaiserkeller the next day, Kirchherr decided that all she wanted to do was to be as close to The Beatles as she could. They had never heard this new music called Rock n` Roll before, having previously only listened to Trad jazz, with some Nat King Cole and The Platters mixed in. The trio then visited the Kaiserkeller almost every night—arriving at 9 o`clock and sitting by the front of the stage. Kirchherr later said:“ It was like a merry-go-rou

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