PHOTOGRAPHY

David Bailey

David Bailey s parents wed after his mother had become pregnant with him. His father, who was a tailor's cutter, had a roving eye and the marriage was unhappy.

His mother and her sister were given occasionally to travelling expensive clothes that were beyond their financial means to buy. In 1948 the image of his mother wearing a Dior dress made a profound, lasting impression upon him.

His academic career at school was undistinguished. He had dyslexia that was only to be diagnosed in adulthood. Upon leaving school he had a series of dead-end job. However, his intelligence expressed itself by his taking an interest in art and jazz. He was a bird watcher and would sometimes borrow his mother's Box Brownie camera to photograph them. He did his national service in the Royal Air Force and revelled in the experienced. It was the first time that he had been exposed to people who were higher up the social scale than petit bourgeois. He found that he was able to charm them and they extended his cultural interests to serious literature. His interest in photography deepened. He learnt how to process film and bought himself a second-hand Rolleiflex.

Following his demob Bailey secured work as a photographer's assistant with John French. The fashion photographer taught him how to use white backgrounds and strong contrasts. There were to become key elements in his future work. Bailey's technique soon overtook that of his employer and he stayed with him for just eleven months.

He liked to stress his East End identity. While not gay, he had a rapport with gay men. Many of them felt a solidarity with him as an East Ender since they were both outsiders.

He developed a relationship with the eighteen-year-old model Jean Shrimpton. He found that it was impossible to take a bad photograph of her.

American Vogue gave him a contract. He and its extravagant editor Diana Vreeland developed a warm relationship. She was happy to provide the financial wherewithal for him to achieve whatever he wished to. He enjoyed the income that his work generated. When working at Vogue House in London, he delighted in parking his Rolls-Royce so that it blocked the much more modest vehicle that was driven by the magazine's managing director. He acquired a house in Primrose Hill and acquired dozens of parrots.

Bailey was profoundly narcissistic and focussed upon his work. Shrimpton found that celebrity isolated her from other people and became increasingly socially isolated. Her loneliness drove into having an affair with the movie actor Terence Stamp. She left Bailey. He was heartbroken by this. It was only one of his principal relationships that he was unhappy that it had ended.

Playboy magazine commissioned him to photograph the French movie actress Catherine Deneuve. His friend Brian Duffy bet him ten shillings that she would not marry him. A fortnight later the couple wed at King's Cross Register. She was appalled by the state of his home. She swiftly concluded that his 60 parrots were the residents and I was definitely the guest. He refused to learn to speak French. She had a son who was schooled in Paris, which meant that she spent time in the city. The marriage did not last.

Bailey started working with the eighteen-year-old model Penelope Tree. They started a relationship that lasted for five years, however, he continued to be self-centred. She developed anorexia, bulimia, and skin problems. He stopped working with her when she put on some weight.

Bailey did not know Antonioni and for several years was mystified as to how so many details of his life had appeared in Blow Up (1967). Finally, his friend the journalist Francis Wyndham (1924-2017) confessed to him that he had written a long and detailed treatment for the Italian director. The producer Carlo Ponti (1912-2007) had read a magazine article by Wyndham about three fashion photographers who came from working-class backgrounds.

Bailey became bored of fashion photography. He began to make television documentaries and travel books. He stopped drinking and started to make television commercials, which were highly remunerative. In the U.K. his fame grew when he featured in a series of advertisements for Olympus cameras that ended with the catchphrase Who do you think you are? David Bailey?

Website: www.davidbaileyphotography.com

Christina Broom

Christina Broom (1863-1939) grew up near Sloane Square. Her parents were well-off but not wealthy. Her brother managed to dispose of most of the family wealth at the gaming tables of Monte Carlo. She inherited a house on Oakley Street. She rented it to Oscar Wilde. His mother lived in it. Broom gave evidence at Wilde's trial.

Broom married an ironmonger. Seven years into her marriage, when she was 40, her husband's shin was injured during a game of cricket. Necrosis effected his tibia and fibulae bones. Physically, he was unable to resume his business. She opened a stationery shop in Streatham. It did not generate a good income. Christina noticed picture postcards sold particular well. She decided to produce her own.

Most women who were photographers worked in studios. She opted to take pictures of London sights and London lives. She earned the respect of her male contemporaries such as Ernest Brooks. This involved lugging about 40lbs. of equipment

During the First World War, Field Marshall Frederick Roberts had a high opinion of her work. Upon one occasion he declared that her images her done more to encourage conscription than his prayers had. The soldier recommended her to King George V. She became one of Buckingham Palace s. Queen Mary included Broom s photographs in her albums.

Queen Mary asked Broom's daughter to ensure that her mother's work was saved for the nation.

Website: www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/march-women-photographing-suffragettes-broom

Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Pattle (1815) was born in Calcutta the daughter of an East India Company official.

While holidaying in South Africa she met both the astronomer Sir John Herschel, who informed her of the early development of photography, and the colonial legal reformer Charles Hay Cameron. She and the latter had six children together and adopted another five.

The Camerons moved to London. She established a salon.

In 1859 Cameron moved to the Isle of Wight, where she purchased a house near Tennyson s. In 1864 her daughter Julia gave her a camera.

In 1873 Cameron moved to Ceylon, where her husband owned plantations. She continued to take photographs.

Virginia Woolf was a great niece of Julia Cameron

Website: www.dimbola.co.uk www.vam.ac.uk/collections/julia-margaret-cameron

Bob Carlos Clarke

Bob Carlos Clarke was deeply resentful of his Old Etonian land agent who had been schooled in a succession of boys-only private school in which he was unable to express his sensitivity. He developed a streak of cruelty, bullying his own younger brother in order to try to secure kudos with his peers. He finished his formal education at West Sussex College of Art. He became a besotted with a pretty girl in the year above him. She occasionally modelled and he offered to take some photographs. She liked the results and they developed a relationship that led to marriage. However, he had learnt that his camera could attract other women. He engaged in numerous infidelities and the marriage failed.

Bob Carlos Clarke developed a style in which he could instil sexiness into mundane, inanimate objects.

Clarke built up the confidence of his models by taking a series of overexposed Polaroids. This made them more willing to shed their clothes. The smouldering eroticism of the final photograph was created by his expertise in processing film.

He was not a deeply sexual person. He was profoundly manipulative of people. Being able to have attractive women take an interest him was derived from this aspect of his character. His second wife Lindsey ran his studio and proved to be tolerant of his infidelities. He would become obsessed with a model and when he tired of her would drop her abruptly. His wife had to comfort numerous young women and help them put themselves together. The only men he was willing to photograph were famous.

Clarke disliked aging and how, in his own view, it made him less attractive. He succumbed to depressive episodes. Following his release from the Priory Clinic he killed himself.

Martin Duffy

Martin Duffy (1933-2010) was raised in East Ham. Identified as a wayward schoolchild, he was sent to a progressive school in South Kensington that introduced him to the visual arts. He responded and went on to secure a place at St Martins to study painting. He switched to dress design because there were a lot of good-looking girls doing it. While working as a freelance fashion artist for Harper's Bazaar he took up photography. He became an assistant for Adrian Flowers. In 1957 Vogue employed him; the magazine was edited by the politically radical Audrey Withers and the forwarding thinking Clare Rendlesham. For his first assignment, he forgot to take off his camera's lens cap. The dark room staff covered for him by accidentally spoiling the film he had. The models with whom he worked closely with Jean Shrimpton, Paulene Stone, and Jennifer Hocking. He enjoyed an informal working environment and using non-studio settings. He was particularly adept as solving technical problems. In 1963 he established his own studio. Norman Parkinson dubbed him, Bailey, and Donovan as the Black Trinity ; Duffy s explanation of the generational difference was Before 1960, a fashion photographer was tall, thin and camp. But we three are different: short, fat and heterosexual. In 1965 he was commissioned to shoot the Pirelli calendar in Monaco. In 1966 David Putnam, who was interested in becoming a movie producer, became his agent. In 1967 he and the novelist Len Deighton, a friend from art school, set up a couple of film production companies. Their films included Oh! What A Lovely War (1969). Duffy found actors to be too self-indulgent for his taste and concluded that he was not suited temperamentally for collaborative work. In 1973 Duffy shot his second Pirelli calendar that used images that had been created by the artist Alan Jones. He photographed three album covers for David Bowie, most notably Aladdin Sane (1973), which was informed by his past collaboration with Jones. Tony DeFries wanted to create the most expensive album cover that a record company could be persuaded to pay for; Duffy regarded it as a competent instance of his work. He did outstanding work for advertising products such as Benson & Hedges cigarettes and Smirnoff vodka but became increasingly disillusioned with commercial work. In 1979 an assistant told him the studio was out of lavatory paper. He gave up photography and tried to burn his negatives. Subsequently, he restored Georgian furniture (his father had been a cabinetmaker). In 2009 he helped to mount an exhibition of his work at the Chris Beetles gallery.

Peter Dunne

Website: https://martinduffyphotography.co.uk

Lewis Morley

Lewis Morley (1925-2013) had studied commercial art at Twickenham Art School. During a period of living in France he took to using photographs to study street life. He came to regard himself as having a photographic sensibility that derived in large part from an appreciation of cinematography. Upon returning to London he worked as a publicity photographer for The Royal Court theatre during its kitchen sink era. He came to know the Beyond The Fringe group of performers. Peter Cook invited him to use the space above The Establishment club as a studio. Technically, Morley was not the most accomplished of photographers. However, he had an intuitive approach that was well-suited to the 1960s.

In 1963 it emerged that Christine Keeler, a nightclub hostess, had had relationships with both Yvegeny Ivanov, a naval attach at the Soviet Embassy and John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War. The Profumo scandal was triggered. It seriously undermined the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan.

In 1963, at the height of the episode, Nicholas Luard and a group of his associates sought to develop a movie that would star Christine Keeler. As part of his efforts to give the project momentum, he commissioned Morley to take some publicity shots of Keeler. The producers insisted that Keeler was contractually obligated to pose naked for some of the images. Keeler proved to be reluctant to do so. Morley cleared the room of everyone else and himself. He then asked to pose naked on a reversed modernist chair.¹ Her modesty was protected by the fact that the chair had a full back. The photograph was the final one taken during the 30-minute-long session. The resulting image became one of the principal icons of 1960s London. It was to be copied and spoofed hundreds of times. Subsequently, Morley voiced the opinion that in person he had not found Keeler to be sexy. She had reminded him too much of the wartime singer Vera Lynn. The image was published in a June 1963 edition of The Sunday Mirror newspaper.

It is reputed that Keeler was to grow to dislike her portrayal because it was to remind how her publicity image had been defined by the scandal. Morley was to view the shot as something of a millstone. This was of the way in which it was to overshadow all his other work. He was one of the people who created parodies of the image.

Location: 18 Greek Street, W1D 4DS (purple, pink)

¹. The chair was a high street copy of Arne Jacobsen's (1902-1971) model 3107 that Morley had bought in a sale at Heal s. Sales of the 3107 were boosted. It is now in part of the Victoria & Albert Museum's design collection.

Roger Mayne

Roger Mayne (1929-2014) studied chemistry at the University of Oxford. His family expected that he would become a chemistry teacher. The death of his father freed him to do what he wished to do, the financial means being furnished by the royalties from a series of mathematical school textbooks that his father had written. Hugo van Wadenoyen introduced him to the progressively-inclined Combined Societies group. This body was seeking to establish itself as an alternative to the Royal Photographic Society. In 1951 the mass circulation magazine Picture Post published a photo-essay that he had created about Between Two Worlds, an experimental ballet that had been performed at the university. The following year he acquired a copy of Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment (Images la Sauvette). Mayne organised a number of touring photographic exhibitions that exposed Britons to contemporary international photography. In 1953 he stayed with the artist Terry Frost in St Ives and became friendly with Patrick Heron and Roger Hilton. He considered the scope that there might be for interpreting the St Ives school's dynamic abstract paintings through photography. As a result, he took to printing his photographs with high contrast in order to emphasise their formal qualities, as well enlarging the size of his prints

Mayne s childhood had left him shy and inarticulate. He disliked having to perform in middle class roles but did desire a degree of immersion within social life. In 1954 he moved to London. Drawing inspiration from Cartier-Bresson, he started working as a street photographer. He was to come to regard himself as being a consolidator in the form rather than an innovator. He often using children and youths as his subjects and was closely associated with the Peter and Iona Opie, who were noted sociologists of childhood. In part, he was trying to document a childhood that he felt that he had been denied. He gravitated towards Westbourne Park, which was then an impoverished portion of West London. His work was concentrated on Southam Street. Over the years 1956 to 1961 he made 27 visits and took 1400 negatives. He used a Zeiss Super Ikonta camera rather than the high-speed Leica, which had become the camera-of-choice for pioneering photo-journalists before the Second World War. Its inhabitants came to accept him as part of their streetscape. Amongst the children who came to know him was Alan Johnson, who went to become a union leader, M.P. and Cabinet member. Mayne's subjects included Teddy Boys and newly-arrived West Indians.

In 1956 Mayne's work was featured in an exhibition that was staged at the I.C.A., was bought by The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and featured on the front cover of The Observer newspaper. This led to his receiving commissions from magazines such as New Left Review, Queen, and Vogue. Two years later he started an association with the Royal Court Theatre. At Colin McInnes's behest, he created the cover photograph for the first edition of the novel Absolute Beginners (1959).

In 1962 Mayne largely ended his work as a street photographer. Southam Street was demolished in 1963 so that Trellick Tower could be built on the site. He stayed in contact with many of the people whom he had photographed in it.

In 1954 Mayne had written to the Victoria & Albert Museum to ask it to acquire material from the touring exhibitions that he had been organising. He received a letter back from Sir Leigh Ashton, the institution's director. This stated that photography is a purely mechanical process into which the artist does not enter. A decade later the Museum bought a number of photographs that he had taken. In 1986 it organised an exhibition of his work that was entitled The Street Photographs of Roger Mayne.

Website: www.rogermayne.com

Eadweard Muybridge

Edward Muggeridge (1830-1904) was a native of Kingston-upon-Thames. In his early twenties he emigrated to the United States. He settled in San Franciso. He worked as a bookseller and then became a landscape photographer. He changed his surname to Muybridge and subsequently his forename to Eadweard.

The railroad tycoon Leland Stanford was fascinated by the way in which horses moved. He and his racehorse trainer found themselves unable to agree on whether a horse took all four of its feet of the ground at one time while running. Stanford hired Muybridge to devise a photographic technique to try to answer the quandary.

Location: 30 High Street, Kingston-upon-Thames, KT1 1LL

Website: www.eadweardmuybridge.co.uk

Terry O'Neill

Terry O'Neill's (1938-2019) first scoop was taking a picture of Rab Butler, the Home Secretary, asleep in a departure lounge at Heathrow. The Daily Sketch newspaper hired him to be an inhouse photographer.

Paparazzi

Ray Bellisario

Ray Bellisario (1936-2018) was a paparazzo who from the mid-1950s until the early 1970s specialised in the royal family. They did not like him. The queen returned the copy of his book To Tread On Royal Toes Impulse Books (1972) that he sent her.

Website: www.darrynlyons.com www.gettyimages.co.uk/photos/ray-bellisario

Smudges

Photographers on Fleet Street were known as smudges.

Peter Dunne

Peter Dunne (1928-2011) worked as a newspaper photographer. He was giving to carrying a clerical dog collar with him. When he felt it to be necessary that he should command more respectability than he enjoyed as a member of the press pack, he would slip it on.

Street Photography

Street photography in Britain often shaded social documentary. Photographers who have worked in the sphere have included include Chris Killip, Roger Mayne, Tony Ray-Jones, and Tom Wood.

Juergen Teller

Juergen Teller grew up in a dysfunctional family that was pervaded by his father s alcoholism. In 1986 he moved to London in order to avoid national service in the German military. The photographer Nick Knight hired him as an assistant.

During a shoot Venetia Scott stated that she liked him but not his work. She encouraged him to be more instinctive and helped him become self-confident. They became a couple and she collaborated with him on his fashion work.

He developed a look in which everything, including the models, was pared down. However, the clothes themselves were not anti-fashion. In the late 1980s his anti-aesthetic was taken up by the fashion magazines. He started to work for mainstream brands such as Hugo Boss, Katharine Hamnett, and Jigsaw.

Germany was a major element in Teller's work

David Backhouse 2024