A three-day exhibition graces Cambridge’s Bridge Gallery like a summer fling starting Friday.
“The Lost Weekend” is a series of photographs named for the 18-month affair John Lennon had with artist May Pang. She started as Lennon and Yoko Ono’s assistant and infamously became Lennon’s lover in 1973, when he separated temporarily from Ono. Pang was 23 at the time.
Her photos from that period show Lennon in a transitional and creative time, as the pair moved to Los Angeles and he took up a free-spirited and freewheeling existence. Some of his most noteworthy post-Beatles solo projects came out then, including the albums “Mind Games” and “Walls and Bridges” and his only No. 1 solo hit single, “Whatever Gets You Through the Night.”
The resulting images show an intimate and different side of the former Beatle. “Father & Son” depicts a family beach day with Lennon and his son, Julian, who’s wearing a mischievous yet happy smirk. Pang arranged that visit as well as the father-son duo’s first meeting in almost three years. In “The Toy,” Lennon poses with a motorcycle, wearing sunglasses and a brown visor. He looks almost unrecognizable from the longhaired era of his bed-ins. Several pieces that will be on view have never been available to the public until now, including one of the last known photos of Lennon and Paul McCartney together.
This exhibit is just one part of a love affair content universe that Pang has mined over the decades since that lost weekend. She’s produced three books about her time with the wife beater-cum-peace activist, and she’s the central figure in a 2022 documentary called “The Lost Weekend: A Love Story.” That film comes down heavily on Yoko Ono, whom Pang says tried to cut off Lennon’s relationship with Julian.
The true nature of the affair and its aftermath may be lost to time, but it’s not too late to hear Pang’s side of the story again. She’ll be at the Bridge Gallery in person this weekend, on tour from New York, to answer burning questions, sign photographs and tell the stories behind them.
“The Lost Weekend – The Photography of May Pang” opens Friday at Bridge Gallery, 5 Pemberton St., North Cambridge, and runs through July 20. Gallery hours are 4 to 8 p.m. Friday; noon to 6 p.m. Saturday; and noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Free.
Share your own 150-word appreciation for a piece of visual art or art happening with photo to editor@cambridgeday.com with the subject line “Behold.”
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