The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Making mischief
Celebrating photographer Norman Parkinson’s playful legacy.
Norman Parkinson’s playful take on fashion photography. By Lucy Davies
DESCRIBED AS ‘a bit flash’ by his rival Cecil Beaton, the British photographer Norman Parkinson – or ‘Parks’, as he was known to the staff at Vogue – was never shy or retiring. His eccentric personal style, including a last-days-of-the-empire moustache and a Victorian smoking cap, was made all the more striking by the fact that he was 6ft 5in.
His contribution to photography – Jerry Hall and Grace Coddington were among the models his work helped catapult to stardom – will be celebrated at this month’s Photo London, where Iconic Images, which took on his 500,000-negative-strong archive earlier this year, will present 60 pictures, about two thirds of which are unseen.
His secret ingredient, says Iconic’s CEO, Robin Morgan, ‘was his playful nature. He had a mischievous eye. A lot of the work we are discovering is very provocative for its day. I think he was trying to push his editors – to tease them, almost.’
Parkinson, who kept working until the very end, dying of a cerebral haemorrhage while on assignment in 1990, said he wanted his obituary to read, ‘He took photography out of the embalming trade, and for a time, the open shutter of his camera was a window to the shimmer of a vanishing England.’ It would be churlish to disagree. Iconic Images will present works from The Norman Parkinson Archive at Photo London, Somerset House, 17-20 May; photolondon.org