Surface photometry of binary galaxies. I. A multicolour study of morphologies due to the interaction. We present the multicolour (B, V, R) surface photometry of 53 doublegalaxies. All the pairs belong to the catalogue of Reduzzi &Rampazzo (1995) containing objects selected according to theKarachentsev (1972) criteria. We comment on the morphological,structural and photometric characteristics of pairs and their members.Different classes of interaction induced phenomena, both among early andlate-type galaxies, are considered. We found that few early-typegalaxies show fine structures. Grand design structure is more frequentlydetected in binary than in field spirals both for barred and non barred,confirming Elmegreen & Elmegreen's (1982) study. The colour of thetails is consistent with the stripping hypothesis since it is similar tothe progenitor galaxy outskirts. Among our objects we have no evidentsign of induced star formation in tails. Rings appear on average bluerthan the disc as a whole.
