The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The man who launched a thousand stars
A new show reveals the epoch-defining vision of the photographer Terence Donovan. By Robin Muir ‘I’d never have got into films if it hadn’t been for Terence,’ says Julie Christie
In British photographic history the late Terence Donovan occupies a curious position. He is a household name, regarded as one of the foremost fashion and portrait photographers of his generation – one of the greatest Britain has ever produced – but until now there has never been a wideranging retrospective to provide the evidence.
For over four decades his images were conspicuous. Actress Julie Christie says that his pictures for Town magazine in 1962 launched her: “I’d done a screen test for Billy Liar and hadn’t got the part. Then the director [John Schlesinger] saw a magazine cover that Terence had taken of me and I landed my first film role. Who knows, would I ever have got into films if it hadn’t been for him?”
A quarter of a century later, Donovan’s pop promo for Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love (1986) with its badly miming, scarletlipped, Alaïa-clad models is regarded as one of the most iconic of the MTV-fuelled Eighties.
That we know so little of his back catalogue was down to his own best efforts. After he died unexpectedly in 1996, aged 60, his negatives were discovered tied up in cardboard boxes. Once published, he rarely allowed his work a second life and deflected inquiry about London in the Sixties, the time and place which saw his reputation soar and with which, for better or worse, he is popularly identified.
Instead, he enjoyed exhibiting his abstract paintings and compiled three books of his work, all idiosyncratic, if not point-blank unusual, and none of which looked back: Glances (1983), a book of nudes with a Freudian text; Fighting Judo (1985), a manual of judo moves and, from 1964, the unclassifiable Women Throooo the Eyes of Smudger Terence Donovan, which never went on sale.
Donovan’s career began in 1959, on the cusp of a new decade, and escalated in tandem with the cultural rise of London, where he was born and spent his whole life. And in the mythology of those times, it’s true he was part of a loose-knit group of photographer friends, including David Bailey and Brian Duffy. Cecil Beaton called them the “Terrible Three” and “the Black Trinity” to Vogue’s Norman Parkinson. They reacted against the high polish of the fashion world with a more casual sensibility. But each was defiantly his own man.
Donovan had a film director’s vision, perfect for the era’s cross-fertilisation of film stars, musicians and photographers. The innovative men’s magazine Town provided him in this respect with opportunities: he played with angles and close-cropping, mimicked Cold War surveillance shots and the grit of the spy thriller.
For Nova, perceived as the most forward-looking of magazines, he experimented with colour to produce impressionistic prints which Beaton found “crepuscular and beautiful”.
In the Eighties he photographed the Paris collections twice yearly for Harper’s Bazaar. Here, he was able to let his imagination run riot, constructing baroque fantasies in opulent settings.
At his death he had just completed a portfolio of Swinging London’s second incarnation for GQ. And National Anthems, a 21portrait portfolio of rock ’n’ roll heroes from Jarvis Cocker to Bryan Ferry, turned out to be his requiem. He died when fashion, music and art had swung around again to coalesce in an era that might have reminded him of those early days.
Now, 20 years after that we have the chance to see both these aspects and many others too from this most British of photographers, brilliant, mercurial and never for an instant dull.