Picture perfect 70 years of celebrity snaps
AWARD-WINNING PHOTOGRAPHER Emma Blau would love to photograph her heroine, singer Debbie Harry, but fears it’s an impossible dream. “She had such an influence on my life — but you don’t get the same access to celebrities my grandfather enjoyed 50 years ago,” she says. “You can’t just write and ask if you can come and take their picture.”
Her grandfather, Tom Blau would do just that back in the 1940s and stars would allow him to call at their homes for a shoot on spec. Blau, a Hungarian refugee, founded the Camera Press agency in 1947. Its star-studded archive of the great, good and glittering is unparalleled in the UK, and is the subject of a new exhibition. From the Queen to Marilyn Monroe, Blau’s stable of photographers captured them.
Blau’s skill in establishing trust is exemplified in an intimate picture of John Lennon and Yoko Ono that will take pride of place in the exhibition.
“John and Yoko were still in bed when he arrived at their estate in Ascot and the house was in chaos,” says his grand-daughter. “But when they came down, he got them to sit either end of a long piano stool and inch towards each other, gazing into each other’s eyes and remembering how they felt as they were falling in love with each other.
“He took the shot in the electric second before they kissed.”
Blau was clearly an engaging figure, making friends with the great photographers that he signed up, including Yousuf Karsh, who photographed the Queen; the Jewish photographer Sterling Henry Nahum, known as Baron who photographed her wedding; fashion photographer Cecil Beaton and Princess Margaret’s husband, Antony Armstrong-Jones, all of them part of the archive.
Blau, according to Emma, believed it was always possible to capture the killer shot in five frames, a confidence not entirely shared by her father, Jon who followed in his father’s footsteps. “He didn’t always get the shot in five,” she admits.
Emma, now the creative director of Camera Press, is the only one of Tom’s grandchildren to make her living with a camera, though her two first cousins, the children of Tom’s daughter Nikki, hold pivotal roles in Camera Press. Her sister Sophie works in university HR.
There were no expectations, she says, that either sister would join the family firm. While she remembers the pleasure of going to work occasionally with Jon at the original offices in a former bomb shelter in Russell Square — “I can still smell the chemicals in the darkroom and that very particular scent of packets of old pictures” — she says: “It was very much my father’s job.” Her ambitions were in the theatre.
I didn’t expect to get a cup of tea from Tina Brown’
You can’t just turn up at a star’s house on spec’
“I wanted to be an actor,” she says, “but I was too young when I left school at 17 to be accepted at drama school, so having done an A level in media studies as well as drama, I went to Goldsmiths to do a BA in media and communication instead.”
It was only in her final year that Emma chose to specialise in photography: “I’d had an Instamatic as a teenager, but this was the first time I had picked up a camera and thought about how I wanted to use it to communicate with the world.”
She worked as a photographer’s assistant then went back to college to do an MA, but everything changed in 2002 when her father died unexpectedly. At 27, Emma found herself a shareholder and director of the agency, along with her sister and cousins.
Over the years, she has taken pictures for publications including Vogue and the Sunday Times, although her approach is very different from her father and grandfather, who were trained as press photographers to work fast. “Camera Press was set up as a news agency, and covering events was always at its heart as well as capturing celebrities.”
She has made time for projects like Face Forward, for which she photographed 400 fellow residents of Lisson Grove and exhibited 140 of the portraits on hoardings to mark the regeneration of the area.
Among the celebrities she has shot in their own homes are New York media couple Tina Brown and her husband Harold Evans: “He knew my grandfather, and wanted to know all about the family, and Tina gave me a cup of tea before the shoot.
“Getting that cuppa was the kind of touch I didn’t expect in New York.” She was even happier when the National Portrait Gallery acquired the picture.
For the new show, Emma has selected her own favourite picture of someone else who strove to put her at her ease — a circus ringmaster — as well as her father’s portraits of Louis Armstrong and Sid James.
From Tom Blau’s star-studded archive there will be his images of talents as diverse as Karl Lagerfeld and Daphne du Maurier, Cliff Richard and Peter Sellers, plus his friend Yousuf Karsh’s portraits of Winston Churchill and Andy Warhol. Marilyn Monroe will also be on show, exuberantly captured in 1954 by Baron.
Camera Press represents Bafta, which is also celebrating its seventieth anniversary this year, and its collection of portraits of leading actors is also part of the exhibition
Camera Press is unusual in being one of the last family-owned, independent photographic agencies. Blau is proud of its role in photographic history and wants to thank the agency’s photographers.
“Their exceptional images, both past and present, which are showcased in this exhibition have played a significant part in shaping the history of photography.”
‘Camera Press at 70’ is on show at the Art Bermondsey Project Space until June 10