On Feb. 7, 1964, The Beatles stepped off a plane at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York and into history. The fifth most important person descending the gangway onto a tarmac teeming with press might have been photographer Harry Benson.

Tucked in somewhere behind Ringo, Benson, a Scottish shooter who managed a ride-along on The Beatles’ first ever American tour, captured the most iconic image of a moment that turned out to be a signpost of cultural history: the newly famous four, looking up and back with simultaneous “can you believe this?” grins.

Benson got on the plane with the band in London with the sense this could be big. Good instinct. Fifty years later, his pictures of The Beatles’ inaugural sojourn stateside have become some of the most famous photos of the 20th century. (Another: the Fab Four clowning with Muhammad Ali in 1964 as he prepared to fight Sonny Liston for the heavyweight championship in Miami.)

In the ensuing years, Benson’s extended tagalong with the band netted him images both wildly public — another shot, of a crowd of tearful teens reaching out to the band in the back of a limousine, was taken while Benson balanced in John Lennon’s lap — and highly intimate: writing sessions (and a pillow fight) in the Hotel George V in Paris, or Lennon and McCartney cozied up at a piano, composing “I Feel Fine.”

Benson’s early-years images of the band were published in a book this year, Harry Benson: The Beatles on the Road, 1964-1966. Many of those have been collected to show at Liss Gallery on Yorkville Ave. in Toronto this week, where Benson’s Beatles pictures, along with others of celebrities like Andy Warhol, Cher, Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, and John and Jacqueline Kennedy (Benson has shot every U.S. president since Dwight Eisenhower) are on view until Dec. 16.

Benson’s images have appeared on hundreds of magazine covers; his career was the subject of an exhibition at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., in 2007.