May Pang was a rock and roll-obsessed teenager when she walked in off the street into a New York building to ask for a job at ABKCO. The company run by music manager Allen Klein, whose biggest clients just happened to be Apple Records and 3/4^ths of the just-broken-up Beatles. Amazingly, she walked out with a receptionist position.

But she soon gravitated toward one Fab in particular—John Lennon—and his wife Yoko Ono. She began helping them with their film projects, and in 1973 at the age of 22, had become their full-time personal assistant.

Later that year, Pang says that Ono had a request of her—one which would surely set off plenty of HR alarms today. The married couple hadn’t been getting along and were going to separate. Would Pang agree to “date” him in the interim? After all, she was nice, familiar…and someone who Ono could keep tabs on.

At first, Pang says she declined. But as she and Lennon began to spend more time together, he made a move, which was then reciprocated. Pang would be John Lennon’s companion, lover, sounding board, muse, and Ms. Fix-It during what is known in Beatles lore as “The Lost Weekend. An 18-month journey from New York to Los Angeles and back to New York again.

During that entire time, Pang took photos. Hundreds of them. The majority showing Lennon in a very relaxed mood in a variety of settings, along with any number of famous friends out on the town or in the studio (the female voice heard on the hit “#9 Dream” is Pang’s).

In 2025, she made several appearances at galleries with The Lost Weekend: The Photography of May Pang.

“I had no real exposure to photography except hanging out in Central Park with a group of men who were amateurs. They all had their cameras,” Pang says via Zoom. “So, I told him was interested, and they let me [shoot] for a few seconds. Then I bought my first one. I just loved taking pictures of friends and their faces and nature.”

She says that when her relationship with Lennon began, she brought her own 35mm along, and then also got an Instamatic. To her disappointment, she no longer owns the 35mm, which she loaned to noted celebrity photographer David Nutter. Unfortunately, when his loft was broken into, all a lot of his equipment was stolen, with Pang’s precious shooter also disappearing.

In today’s age where everyone is a photographer and can instantly see (and improve) their work, Pang recalls taking rolls of film to be developed—albeit to a professional photography place. No chance in her dropping off these to a local drug store where they could lost, damaged, or sold to the media by a teenaged clerk looking for beer money.

By 1973, John Lennon had spent a decade being incessantly filmed and photographed, often to his annoyance. But being the subject of Pang’s lens was a wholly different situation.

“He liked my eye for photography, and I was shocked. I would take pictures of him just doing all sorts of things at home. And he said, ‘Let me see some of the work you’ve done.’ I thought he was going to yell at me and say not to take anymore,” Pang says.

“So, he looked at them and said ‘You can continue on. I like your eye. You make me look good!’ I said, ‘What do you mean, you have all these professionals taking pictures?’ He saw pictures of himself as fat and that got him at the wrong angles. He said I didn’t.”

In fact, Pang took a picture of a picture. When Bob Gruen took the famous photo of Lennon on a rooftop in a T-shirt that read “New York City,” Pang snapped a frame of Gruen snapping his. “That was right off our kitchen. You had to climb off through the side window to the roof!” Pang laughs.

Two other photos she took ended up being of extreme importance to Beatles fans. One was of Lennon and a visiting Paul McCartney lounging by the pool in a California house rented by singer/songwriter Harry Nilsson (Lennon was producing his Pussy Cats record). It is the last known photo taken of the famous musical partners together.

Even if McCartney at the time was had an unfortunate spiky Rod Stewart rooster haircut while sporting a small moustache.

“That was the period when Paul was going through that suave Dick Dastardly [phase]!” Pang says. “There’s also one of John and Ringo at the piano, and there’s all these patterns and colors and stripes. I went into a psychedelic [state] without even taking anything!”

Asked if there was ever a situation where she wished she had taken a picture and hadn’t, Pang is quick to answer: One of Lennon with George Harrison when the couple attended an after party to mark the end of Harrison’s “Dark Horse” tour.

She also regrets not having a camera in hand on November 28, 1974 at Madison Square Garden when Lennon joined Elton John onstage for three songs. It fulfilled a bet he lost to the bespectacled piano man if their collaboration “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” hit #1 on the chart. It did. And it marked the last public performance of Lennon’s life.

Another photo has no faces, but Lennon’s hand scrawling his signature across a document that formally dissolved the Beatles partnership. The other three had already signed, but Lennon had failed to show up at the set date and time. So the deed was done in a hotel room during a trip Lennon, Pang, and his son Julian, and former wife Cynthia Lennon had taken to Disney World in Florida.

Pang says it was just herself, Lennon, and two lawyers in the room. Lennon encouraged her to take the photo, but Pang was also concerned with Julian Lennon, alone in an adjoining room.

“The room was so dark, but I caught him mid-signature. John was actually laying on a bed when he signed it,” Pang says. “And all four signatures are there, even though some people can’t see it. One goes the other way. Because Ringo is a lefty!”

Julian Lennon has since gone on to praise Pang for not only bridging the tenuous relationship with his father but befriending his mother Cynthia as well. Julian and May continue to have warm relations, and Lennon the younger used a Pang-shot photo of his younger self on the cover of his 2022 record Jude.

“Those were cherished times with the two of them. And I’m glad that I was there to see it,” Pang says.

Pang and Lennon’s relationship ended abruptly when Lennon returned to Ono in early 1975, even as he and Pang were looking at houses to purchase. She says they continued to have occasional intimacies and at least communications right up until his 1980 murder. She chronicled her experience in the 1983 book Loving John (later reissued as John Lennon: The Lost Weekend) and in 2008 released a photo book, Instamatic Karma.

But the best telling of Pang’s story is undoubtedly the 2022 documentary The Lost Weekend: A Love Story. It’s inventive, charming, heartbreaking, and fascinating all at once, and features lots of never-or-rarely-seen videos and photos. There’s little doubt left to the viewer that their love affair was deep and real. And one surprise at the end can move even a hardened music journalist to tears.

The touring exhibit featured 38 of Pang’s photos, all available for purchase as 16” x 20” archival pigment prints, limited to 199 copies each, with most selling for $950. Pang with sign and number each purchase and pose with the customer in a photo.

For a less expensive option, 11” x 17” posters of The Lost Weekend doc sell for $50, and Pang will sign those. Due to an agreement, she can only sign gallery purchases, so people should not bring books, records, DVDs, etc. She will answer questions and tell stories about her life and work.

As for Houston, Pang says she’s never been to the city before but remembers its name of the coming off the tongue of Lennon.

“John would always call Houston ‘Who-ston’’” she laughs. “Because that’s how the English pronounce it!”

For more on May Pang and her work, visit MayPang.com

This interview originally appeared at HoustonPress.com