David Bailey has made an outstanding contribution to photography and the visual arts, creating consistently imaginative and thought-provoking portraits. As well as new work, this landmark exhibition includes a wide variety of Bailey’s photographs from a career that has spanned more than half a century.
He shot his first cover for the magazine in 1960. Bailey was ostensibly a fashion photographer, but as he said himself, he liked photographing women, not clothes, and he was much more than that. Bailey’s Box of Pin-Ups – a collection of poster prints, published in 1965 – and Goodbye Baby & Amen – his ‘Sara band’ to the 1960 s, published in 1969 – are bookends of the era, with their portraits of every major cultural figure of the day, including the Beatles, the Stones, Terence Stamp, Twiggy, Peter Blake, Andy Warhol, Michael Caine, Mia Farrow… Bailey was as much an emblem of the times as the people he photographed, in the vanguard of the working-class invasion of British popular culture with Stamp, Caine and Bailey’s photographer friends Brian Duffy and Terence Donovan.