the perfectionist Centenary Medallist David Bailey HonFRPS discusses Bailey s Stardust, his massive and long overdue exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, with David Land, and puts his career, spanning over half a century, into context Right Mick Jagger. Far right Kate Moss, 2013. exhibition s called Bailey s Stardust, says David Bailey. I was The first approached about having a major show around seven years ago, but I d never liked the way that, at the National Portrait Gallery, photography always seemed to get shown in that room at the back. To my mind, that marginalised the medium of photography, and I owe it rather more than to allow that to happen. I wasn t interested unless they gave me the whole ground floor, and it took a few years for them to come back and say, All right, you ve got the whole ground floor. This means the show occupies the same space Freud was allocated for his paintings, which is a very positive thing for photography. Now aged 75, Bailey s career spans over half a century. Although calling him an icon borders on the sort of cliché he personally goes some distance to avoid, he remains a photographer on a scale matched by no other the UK has produced. To a very large public, Bailey is photography, and he s certainly the only British photographer ever to have become a household name. He is also the curator of Bailey s Stardust. I wanted artistic control, and I didn t want a curator, he says. Asked if the scale of the project over 250 prints took him by surprise, he says, No, no. The show is only portraits. It s not a retrospective, and it doesn t include fashion reportage, so in a way it was easier to do. If it was everything I ve shot, it could have been 10 times the size. I printed 95% of the black and white silver prints myself, mostly in the evenings. I was printing on Christmas Day last year. But I ve also got great people working with me, and I couldn t have done it without them. Born in Leytonstone, and attending school in Ilford, Bailey is a true East Ender, growing up in the same nest of streets as film director Alfred Hitchcock. He was about two streets away, says Bailey. And I knew about him. My mother was a big cinemagoer. It was cheaper to go 14 RPS Journal February 2014
to the cinema than to put a shilling in the meter. I was proud, in a way. I thought, I come from the same place as Hitchcock, and he s still one of my heroes. My father was a tailor, and mum was a machinist. We weren t starving, but on a winter s night you used to have to break the ice on the outside toilet before using it. One of my early memories is sitting there, freezing, looking out at the stars through the pyramid shapes cut in the top of the door. Being extremely dyslexic, and a bit dyspraxic as well, I wasn t what my teachers considered academic. I was actually treated like a moron at school; I d get caned for not being able to spell, but I m not complaining. One thing that really changed my life, a few years on, was the credit card, because it meant I no longer had to spell things when I wrote out cheques. Bailey s first love was jazz. Photography February 2014 RPS Journal 15
came later, and in his early teens he wanted to be Chet Baker: stealing his father s binoculars at 15 to pawn them and buy a trumpet. The trumpet later became lost after he lent it to an officer and a gentleman while doing his National Service in Singapore. But while I was in Singapore I bought a camera, he says, a Canon rangefinder. They were incredibly cheap, because it was all tax free. Bailey says that it was seeing Cartier-Bresson s 1948 picture of Muslim women on the slopes of a Kashmir hill, praying toward the sun rising behind the Himalayas, that really turned him on to photography. I realised then that photography had something to offer, he says. I discovered Picasso at that point too, which was a bit like getting religion. It changed my life. By the time I came back to England, I liked photography, and thought it would be a good thing to do, but I didn t know how. Coming from the East End, I didn t have any connections, so I just tramped around. Bailey started work at David Olins studio, moving on to John French after about three months. Fashion photography at the time was mainly shot on large format with tungsten lighting, but French s studio was using David Cecil strobe units. They looked like tungsten movie lights because they were adapted, rather than purpose made for flash, he says. John was shooting 10x8 mostly, and Rolleiflexes, although we assistants persuaded him to get a Hasselblad. Bailey s early career progression very much echoed the speed of the times. Today, we tend to notice the world has changed a little while after it s happened. But the 1960s were different, and you had to run to keep up.. Long established values were being discarded with lightning rapidity. It was the age of television and the transistor radio, and youth to some extent really did reign supreme. There was plenty of work and, in London at least, if you didn t like your job, you could walk into another in the next street. Bailey spent 11 months with John French, moved on to Studio Five for another three, and then landed the impossible: finding himself at the top of the tree, on contract with Vogue, where in the space of the next 12 months he shot over 800 pages. The world was changing fast, and simply had no time 16 RPS Journal February 2014
Far left The Krays, 1965. Left Damon Albarn. for hangers-on. Not everything was shot for Vogue however. Many of his pictures now considered to define the 1960s: like portraits of Terence Stamp, The Beatles, Mick Jagger, Jean Shrimpton, P J Proby, Cecil Beaton, Rudolf Nureyev, and Andy Warhol, were shot for his books Box of Pin Ups, and Goodbye Baby & Amen. Speed also defines Bailey s approach to portraiture. He s kind of proud of his reputation for being very quick. I usually talk to the person more before I take the photograph, he says. But, depending on the subject, a portrait can take from five minutes to a couple of hours. For me, a portrait s about getting something from the sitter. My pictures can t be copied, because it s never really about photography. It s about the emotion in the photograph. Turning to Bailey s Stardust, he says, The show comprises more than headshots. I ve also mixed in some of my travels to places like Ethiopia and Sudan. It s not just portraits of the sort of people today described as celebrities. I don t do celebrities. I do talented people. If someone wants to call them a celebrity, it s nothing to do with me. Bailey s Stardust is organised thematically, with rooms devoted to subjects such as The Rolling Stones and other Rock n Roll; Fashion; and Gangsters and the East End. Asked whether any section or individual photograph has a particular resonance for him, Bailey says, I don t really have favourites. I don t have a favourite dog, I don t have a favourite colour. But there are people I respect: particularly a few favourite painters and photographers. I usually respect people when I know I could never do what they do, because it s something alien to me: Bruce Weber for instance, or Bill Brandt. Discussing his famous picture of the Krays, which appears in the Gangsters and the East End section, Bailey says, There have always been gangs in the East End. All my life, if there s been a bad guy on TV, he s always been from the East End; but it s a cliché, and I wanted to come up with something more exciting than that. Commenting on David Bailey s East End Faces, his exhibition at Walthamstow s William Morris Galley last year comprising large blow ups of shots he took in pubs and on the East End streets in the 1960s, I ask whether going back to this material was part of the February 2014 RPS Journal 17
process he went through in producing Bailey s Stardust, but he won t be drawn. I don t think I m going back to anything, he says. Selecting portraits from a half century s work can t have been easy however, but the final decision on whether or not to include a portrait seems to have come down to the image, rather than the subject. There were people I ve photographed who I think of as important, who should have been in the show, but I don t like my picture enough, so it hasn t gone in, he reflects. Then sometimes, it s been the opposite: I might not think much of somebody, but it s a really interesting portrait, so in it goes. And Bailey s Stardust? The title comes from the name of his favourite song, by Hoagy Carmichael who, as a kid, he thought of as the first cool white guy. But it also holds a secondary meaning, an allusion to the transient nature of existence: to where we come from, and will at our end return: stardust. I end the show with skulls, says Bailey. A skull is the ultimate piece of art, because it s what we end up as. Despite being a photographer with a fearsome reputation for large format portraiture, Bailey s attitude to technology has always been to push the envelope, and embrace the new, whether that be flash in John French s studio, or the then new Hasselblad. He s recently been out on the streets of Harlem, trying the Nokia Lumia 1020 41MP cameraphone, with his long time friend, fashion photographer Bruce Weber. One of the first to try digital cameras, through his long term relationship with Olympus, Bailey says, I always thought digital would be interesting. People used to laugh at me, especially my artist friends. They d say, That s for accountants, and I d say, Wait and see what you ll be able to do with this. Digital changed things, just as the stiff paintbrush changed things. Before that, you couldn t really have had Expressionism or Impressionism. I still prefer film cameras though, because they all have a different attitude, which makes you take a picture in a different way, and makes the person who is photographed react differently, as well. Take the Rolleiflex. You have to look down into it, which makes me look a bit like Friar Tuck, because I ve got a bald bit on the back of my head; whereas when you re shooting with a Leica, it covers your face. I prefer working with plate cameras, because then you can actually see the person you re photographing, and they can see 18 RPS Journal February 2014
Left Jerry Hall & Helmut Newton, 1973. Above Francis Bacon. you, and you can talk to each other. I still use an 11x14, and it makes people react like they re in a cathedral. Get a Polaroid camera out, and they act like they re in a nightclub. Commenting that Bailey s Stardust was three years in the making, Bailey s mind turns to commercial practice, and he reflects that he also has to work to make money to keep everybody who works for him. I m so busy, I never get time to do anything, because I m always doing something, he says. That sounds like a Duffy quote! I say that presumably, rather than his having to seek work these days, clients must mostly come to him. He says, Well, they more or less always have. In the early days, they d show me a picture, and say, Can you do it?, and I d say, Of course I can, but don t show me something you want copied. If you want something original, I might do it. It s the way you are, and you can t really change the way you are. It s in your genes, or your destiny. These comments hint at the uncompromising approach which gives rise to Bailey s reputation for being difficult, but he puts this down to the English temperament. In England I m difficult, in France I m a perfectionist, and in Italy they just call me Maestro, he says. It s to do with the attitude of people in this country. I ask whether, given this, he ever considered basing himself in another country. Oh no, he says. Although I ve lived in New York, and I did all my best commercials there, I love London. I m a Londoner through and through. I m just not going to be directed when I m taking pictures. Once the girl s dressed, I won t even let the fashion editor on the set. That s it: she s mine. They can make all their policy decisions in the dressing rooms; not while I ve got the girl on camera. It s the same when I work on movies: nobody is allowed to talk to the model. It distracts them, and interferes with what you re doing and what they re doing. Bailey who, far from sticking to stills, has throughout his career made hundreds of TV commercials and several films, says, Really, all my money from advertising came from directing TV commercials. They would give me a script and ask me to come up with a storyboard. I liked doing that, because it was something that was interesting rather than just copying. But I really did it to make enough money to keep doing photography people don t realise how expensive it is to do photography. Further addressing his reputation for being difficult, he comments that the reason he is simply called Bailey has nothing to do with megalomania. It s for the same reason Donovan was called Donovan, Duffy, Duffy, and Avedon, Avedon, he says. It was a Vogue thing. In the early days of Condé Nast, you were addressed by your February 2014 RPS Journal 19
surname. We didn t get full names until the late 1960s. But yes, in some ways I was the difficult one; at Vogue, for example, insisting on showing the shots I d selected rather than letting them see all my contacts: along the way making it easier for Bruce Weber and Patrick Demarchelier, and all those guys who came after me. But it s not about being difficult. I m not difficult. I just want to get it right. If I ask someone to build me a brick wall, I don t tell him how to lay the bricks. And if someone asks me to take a picture, they either want it the way I do it, or let s not do it. And if I didn t get paid? Yes, I d still take pictures. I used to bump into Donovan down the East End at weekends all the time. He d be down there with his 10x8 taking pictures, same as me. I never go anywhere without a camera. David Land Left Catherine Bailey Bailey s Stardust 6 Feb-1 June National Portrait Gallery, London www.npg.org.uk Bailey s Stardust Featuring a cover painting by Damien Hirst. National Portrait Gallery, 45. ISBN 978-855144521 Bailey Exposed National Portrait Gallery. 9.99. ISBN 978-855144668 Bailey s Box of Postcards 36 cards, featuring a broad range of Bailey s portraits in a sturdy pull-drawer giftbox. 14.95. www.npg.org.uk/shop 20 RPS Journal February 2014