26 May 1969, Montreal
Original caption: Close-up of the feet of Beatle John Lennon and wife Yoko Ono in bed during their “Bed-in for Peace”.
John and Yoko with the Montreal devotees during their bed-in at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, Montreal. 1969
In 1969, one of the most famous celebrity couples of the time — John Lennon and Yoko Ono — turned the last week of their honeymoon into a political and social action. They announced that they were going to spend that week secluded in room 902 of the Hilton hotel in Amsterdam, going nowhere and seeing nobody. Thus, they protested against the war in Vietnam and violence in the modern world, on the whole. Love against war.
Few people know that, during most of that week, their guest was Nico Koster, young photo-correspondent of De Telegraaf, a major Dutch newspaper. He took a lot of pictures of the eminent newlyweds, and the whole cycle reflects an intimate friendly feeling. In 1969, De Telegraaf published just one photo that became famous: John Lennon and Yoko Ono pose in bed with a giant flower-basket, and behind them on the window there are two sheets of paper with hand-written slogans: “BED PEACE” and “HAIR PEACE”.
The rest of the photographs of the cycle were not published in 1969. The negatives were lost, but 40 years after the photographer’s daughter Nicole found them in an envelope with her childhood drawings.
