The big picture: George Harrison and Pattie Boyd's honeymoon, Barbados, 1966

The big pictureGeorge HarrisonThis image of Beatle George Harrison and his first wife stands at odds with the final photograph of his bandmate John Lennon

Photographs can arrest waves before they crash on the shore: they have the power to extract moments from the flow of time. Hence the attraction of happy snaps such as this one, which presents a honeymoon as the prolongation of playful childhood, not the start of adult life. It is a reminder of how infectiously boyish the Beatles were, before their protests against the Vietnam war and their blissed-out flirtation with eastern religion. They made a film, after all, in which they did nothing but run, jump, stand still and generally enjoy themselves.

Pattie Boyd, a rock chick who later married Eric Clapton and was also fruitlessly wooed by Mick Jagger, seems to have been a playmate as much as a lover. She wanted a career as a model, and had the starved physique that was fashionable in the 60s, but she was tripped up by her rabbity front teeth, here seen poking through her lips. George asked her to marry him the moment they met; when she demurred he asked her out to dinner instead. On this beach in Barbados, they are not exactly trying out the copulatory callisthenics of the Kama Sutra. She bestraddles George's back like a papoose, and reads the contours of his face with her fingers as if she were a baby deciphering the world for the first time. He clearly relishes her touch, which is why he closes his eyes to isolate the sensation, but the entanglement of their limbs is unerotic, and he is rendered harmless by the woolly sweater that demurely covers his crotch. Together they make up a weirdly polymorphous sea creature, with as many tentacles as an octopus.

The scene is happy because innocent, though maybe the surfy waves blab a more confidential story about the pair. Botticelli's newborn Venus floats on just such a bed of foam, which according to Greek myth was a spermatic froth left behind by the butchered testicles of a god. George lifts Pattie out of the wet mire, but his knees are mucky; they are honeymooning beside an ocean because that is the fertile source of life itself.

There is a postscript. Another photograph of a married Beatle, taken in a colder climate during a more troubled decade, marks the end of the group's history: it is Annie Leibovitz's portrait of a naked John Lennon foetally curled around a fully clothed Yoko Ono, who – unlike the adoring Pattie, physically inseparable from George – lies back impassively on a bed and permits herself to be embraced. Hours after the session in their New York apartment in December 1980, Lennon was murdered on the street outside. Photography's preserved moments are precious because they are what remains when a marriage, or a life, is over.

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