Chasing the '60s

Photographer David Bailey's sexy past work haunts nearly every shot on display in his new collection.

By Charles Taylor

Mar 29, 2002 | There are more breasts and buttocks in David Bailey's new collection of photos "Chasing Rainbows" than in almost any of the other collections of his work. Partly that's because this is later work, from the '70s to the '90s, and Bailey was dealing with less restrictive editorial policies at the magazines for which he shot. Why, then, is this -- with a few blessed exceptions -- the unsexiest work Bailey has ever done? The answer is that Bailey's sexy past work haunts nearly every shot on display here.

"David Bailey is part of the mythology of the 1960s," writes Robin Muir in the introduction to "Chasing Rainbows," "and any serious scrutiny of his career must first of all disengage him from that mythology." Fat chance. How do you disengage someone from the time in which their best work was done? Other visual artists have moved beyond their identification with that decade. Nobody thinks of David Hockney as a '60s artist, though that's the decade in which he emerged (and with his schoolboy caps, striped shirts and blunt-end knit ties, looked so much a part of).

Bailey, who has worked steadily since the '60s, remains the fetishizing eye of Swinging London, forever associated with his photos of Jean Shrimpton and Penelope Tree and mythologized by David Hemmings in Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up." In our heads he never escaped the decade.

It's not such a bad heritage to claim. Much of Muir's commentary in "Chasing Rainbows" takes care to establish how Bailey's fashion photography -- black-and-white, hard-edged, a glamour industry appropriation of the verité-style filming of the French New Wave and the "kitchen sink" realism of early '60s British cinema -- made a decisive break with what fashion photography, epitomized by British Vogue, had been until then. Muir quotes director and critic Jonathan Miller, who spoke of Vogue promising "elegant corruption: a whiff of Beardsley," only to deliver "gentility." Miller was referring to the formal poses in the fashion photography of the time. Bailey, an East End cockney, said he didn't have his head in a cloud of pink chiffon, but was suited to the job of fashion photographer nonetheless because "I loved to look at all women."

The collection of Bailey photos in the 1999 book "Birth of the Cool," its text by fashion photography historian Martin Harrison, tells the story. Working out of an interest in photojournalism, and likely influenced by the London photos of Bill Brandt, Bailey broke with the tradition of glamour photography epitomized by photographers like Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Horst and George Hoynigen-Huene. He had more in common with the "realism" in the photos of William Klein or Frank Horvat or his contemporary Terence Donovan.

Bailey was lucky enough to work with models like Sue Murray, Pauline Stone and the woman who would be his greatest muse (and girlfriend), the exquisite Jean Shrimpton. For a 1962 Vogue series called "New York: Young Idea Goes West," Bailey shot Shrimpton in Manhattan crowds, in a phone booth, waiting for a walk sign. In all the shots, she is a slim, calm center in the midst of the surrounding grit and movement. The photos both emphasized and celebrated the artificiality of fashion.

"Birth of the Cool" makes a strong case for Bailey as a portraitist as well, of people and places. There are stark, unpopulated shots of the about-to-vanish East End of London (the area was designated for a major postwar architectural "upgrade") that, while they lack traces of life, bear some relation to Bill Brandt's '30s shots of working-class England. The shots of luminaries (including Brandt himself) encompass not just the pop figures of the era -- Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger, the notorious Kray brothers -- but actors and directors and writers like Terence Stamp, Peter Ustinov, John Huston, Rita Tushingham, Julie Christie and Arnold Wesker. They are seen in sometimes startling isolation, bringing their public personas into relief.

Sometimes the sides of the frames are visible, as they are in the work of Richard Avedon. But unlike Avedon, Bailey doesn't pin his subjects like funhouse-mirror butterflies. Even at their most exaggerated -- particularly in the photos of David Frost and Barry Humphries -- the only comment seems to come from the subjects themselves, not Bailey's preset idea of them.

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