David Bailey, Immortal

David Bailey wanted to play jazz, like his hero Chet Baker, but his trumpet was stolen when he was 19. He bought a Rolleiflex camera, by which happy accident he became a finger on the handful of photographers who have defined their age. And you don’t have to guess which finger: the “up yours” of his most iconic images nailed a time and place like no one has since. But an exhibition opening at Spain’s MOP Foundation at the end of June aims to prove that Bailey’s claim on posterity rests on more than his portraits from Sixties London.

“We had to talk him into including more fashion,” says his son, Fenton, a co-curator of the show. “Everyone wants to see things that haven’t been seen before.” Possibly to reflect that, the exhibition is titled “David Bailey’s Changing Fashion,” and its 200 images, whittled down from a possible 3000, offer a refresher on two key decades of a career whose breadth may come as a surprise, especially as it spotlights Bailey’s witty, seductive colour work from the Seventies.

Fact is, most people still know Bailey for his close-cropped, monochrome portraits from the Sixties. They established him as the arch-chronicler of a cultural watershed, and they’re about as iconic as a photographic image can get, so it’s impossible to imagine a Bailey show of this scale without them. Appropriately, they’re represented at MOP by the entirety of 1965’s Box of Pin-Ups, 38 gravures which originally sold for £3. (You’ll pay £20,000 now.)

Described at the time as a “popcracy,” the images have since “transcended ephemerality to become austerely poignant and authentic documents,” according to art historian Martin Harrison. Here you find the classic images of Lennon and McCartney, Jagger, Hockney, Michael Caine, Bailey’s model girlfriend Jean Shrimpton, Cecil Beaton and Rudolf Nureyev à deux, and, notoriously, Ronnie and Reggie Kray, the twins who dominated London’s gangland with a sadistic, vice-like grip. Bailey called Ronnie “the scariest person I ever met.” And Lord Snowdon, another of the pin-ups, was so horrified to be sharing space with the Krays, he saw to it that the book was never published in the United States.

It’s not only the monochrome — or some of the subject matter — that cast a shadow over the pin-ups. Bailey grew up with the triple whammy of dyslexia, dyspraxia and a father whose constant flatulence was so toxic it left him with a lifelong loathing of farts. “Language skills are not his strength,” says Bailey’s wife Catherine. “He’s not very good at articulating what he wants. He speaks through images.”

Later in life, if he wasn’t taking photos, he was painting. And, since his diagnosis of vascular dementia in 2018, both have been a lifeline for him. When he photographed Marta Ortega Pérez, chairwoman of Zara owner Inditex and the founder of MOP, “It was like a lightbulb being turned back on,” says Catherine. “Taking pictures is who he is. He doesn’t think about legacy, it’s up to what the people who get left behind do. He refuses to acknowledge mortality. He doesn’t plan on dying.” Now 87, he also doesn’t believe there’s anything wrong with him, according to his wife, even as the dementia has exacerbated his other traits. That means the MOP show has truly been a monumental labour of love for those closest to Bailey.

“He always jumped from one subject to another,” recalls Catherine. “Schizophrenic’s not the word, he’s always got a camera and he’s constantly photographing whoever he’s with.” She knows this side of Bailey better than anyone. “It’s irritating when you’re trying to get on with your daily life, but years later, in hindsight, the pictures you might have complained about…”. There are books of Bailey’s photos of Catherine that finish that sentence for her. She never saw herself in those pictures. “It’s someone else’s interpretation of you, a version.” No surprise that it’s the personal photos that are her favourites. Same with Fenton, who points to a picture his father took of him when he was 4 or 5. He’s a baby Lancelot, brandishing a sword in a field.

Bailey never thought of himself as a fashion photographer. “My photos weren’t about fashion, they were about the woman,” he once said. “I was interested in photographing the woman in the dress, not the dress on the woman. The only time I noticed a dress, it usually turned out to be Balenciaga or Saint Laurent. The rest were just frocks.” Bailey always preferred his portraiture, which lends some irony to the fact that it was actually fashion that made him, with a little help from Shrimpton. Their liaison is rivalled only by Meisel-Evangelista as the greatest photographer-model pairing in fashion history.

He was a birdwatcher when he was a kid. He loved Bambi too (and nursed an enduring hatred of Hitler after a V-2 bomb blew up the movie theatre where he’d watched the movie. Who killed Bambi? Hitler did!). Women were “birds” in the parlance of Sixties London. Shrimpton, with her gangly legs, was a proper Bambi bird. He didn’t marry her. He married Catherine Deneuve instead, a month after meeting her through Roman Polanski. When the short-lived liaison ended, Bailey fell for the model Penelope Tree, who revitalised his love of image-making after his mid-Sixties slump, when Time magazine’s “Swinging” London cover was the scene’s ultimate kiss of death. He didn’t marry her either. He waited a few years before his next marriage to the Hawaiian beauty Marie Helvin. After that came Catherine Dyer who, to this day, is the definitive Mrs Bailey. He filled pages of Vogue with all these women, making fashion stars of them, but he also created intimate, occasionally visceral visual testaments to all of them as well. It’s remarkable how undatable those pictures are. A sequinned Deneuve on the set of Les Demoiselles de Rochefort with her sister Françoise Dorleac in 1967? Tell me that’s not yesterday, cigarette aside (everyone is smoking in Bailey’s pictures).

It’s not only photos by Bailey, it’s also photos of Bailey that resonate. The image that Bert Stern captured of him photographing proto-supermodel Veruschka in 1965 surely shaped a key scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up two years later with Veruschka again and David Hemmings as superstar lensman Thomas. Their give-it-to-me-baby writhing birthed the cinematic coitus-by-camera cliché that climaxed with Austin Powers decades later. Producer Carlo Ponti originally wanted Bailey for the part of Thomas. Meta before such an idea even existed.

My own favourite is another image from ’65. Bailey is showing a model how to pose. He’s wearing a white singlet, tight slacks, Cuban heels, a right bit of trade with a touch of fashion fey. Picture that touching down in Vogue’s refined universe. Bailey was in the vanguard of a working class invasion that erased conventional British stuffiness with a brazenly confident sense of self. When he showed up with Shrimpton in Diana Vreeland’s office in New York, she proclaimed to all and sundry, “England has arrived!” She immediately grasped that their mere appearance marked a significant shift in the fashion zeitgeist.

Nearly twenty years ago, when I interviewed him for Fantastic Man magazine, Bailey was fabulous, piss and vinegar, spraying bon mots all over the studio. “I’m not interested in photography, I’m interested in the relationship you can have with somebody,” he declared. “Avedon said it’s got nothing to do with sex, I think it’s all about sex.” And, still later, “Your photos are your friends and you’re friendly with people because they have something you don’t have.”

That reminded me of something one of his best photographer friends Bruce Weber once said, about photographing what you wish you were. Bailey has been labelled “a monstrous narcissist.” To me, it feels more like he was a perpetual outsider, trying to isolate what “in-ness” was. Perhaps that was the fascination of portraiture for him, the pursuit of other people’s truth as opposed to the superficiality of his fashion work. He very deliberately never photographed his hero Picasso because he was scared to disrupt the fantasy he’d created around the artist. Another dream subject that got away was Fidel Casto.

We talked about how awful the clothes were in those early fashion shoots with Shrimpton. “If you can see the clothes, even the worst fashion picture is at least a document of a period,” he said then. Decades earlier, he’d told another interviewer, “To leave a record is the most you can hope for in photography.” The documenting of social groups is clearly something Bailey has always excelled at. He loved identifying nature’s species when he was a boy. As a precocious young adult, he followed Box of Pin-Ups with 1969’s stunning Goodbye Baby and Amen, a sign-off to London’s Swinging Sixties that stings now with the intrusion of brutal reality. By then, the Krays had been arrested and imprisoned for murder, and seven months after Bailey photographed her with Polanski, Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson family. Those portraits have become a kind of memento mori because so many of the people in them are dead. Years ago, Bailey told me why, as far as he was concerned, they didn’t live on in his pictures. “They can’t fuck, and if you’re not fucking, you’re not living.” A sentiment shared by his hero Picasso. Or, should I say, an un-sentiment, because there was no sentimentality in Bailey.

And yet he kept on making his extraordinary documents. In December 1965, Bailey shot the entire Christmas issue for Vogue. In June 1998, he created a “Cool Britannia” portfolio, again for Vogue. He’s currently working on a new “Box of Pin-Ups,” these ones using Polaroid 55 film, with a solarised effect. Rod Stewart popped in for a pic. But Bailey may already have created his dernier cri when it comes to mapping the culture. Over the last three months of 2023, he shot a portfolio of 100 designers, models, artists, musicians and assorted faces for stylist Katie Grand’s Perfect Magazine.

After the death of her husband, Grand was in a nostalgic mood. “I suppose I was feeling especially sentimental about imagery and preserving people’s legacies and having huge respect for the process of photography.” She’d never worked with Bailey but one particular shoot of Marie Helvin in swimsuits and coloured stockings, Vogue Italia 1976, was a watershed for her. “The stockings were cut-down tights in bright colours which looked great against the blue sky,” Grand remembers. “I was surprised to hear he styled the shoot.”

There are portraits in Perfect that could slot right in with those Sixties works of genius: the choreographer Wayne McGregor, the hairstylist Anthony Turner, the photographer David Sims and his son Ned. “Bailey liked the idea of a new set of subjects,” says Grand. “Some were people he suggested and had his own nostalgia about — Penelope, Marie, Jerry, Naomi, Kate — and then we brought quite a youthful cast. I think he wanted to retain some control over the cast, which was understandable given how many people we shot. And also, he needed to be inspired. The rules were no more than five people a day, and no agents or PA’s on set.”

Thinking about that work, and all the faces in all the work that became before it, it occurred to me that there’s been one unifying thread. Glaringly obvious, actually. As much as Bailey’s pictures capture particular moments in time, they ultimately defy it, because they’re not about time, they’re about place. And that place is London. The love of his life. In that sense, Bailey stands for everything the city has always stood for in fashion: a renegade spirit that every so often manages to change the world. As long as there’s London, there’ll always be David Bailey.