YEAR OF WONDERS
On Norman Parkinson, the photographer who captured Vogue Australia’s first cover in 1959.
British author and curator Terence Pepper is an expert on Norman Parkinson, the photographer who captured Vogue Australia’s first cover in 1959. Revisiting that time, Pepper discovered the year was a fortuitous one not only for the magazine, but for the legendary man behind the camera, too.
WHILE WORKING THIS year on two major projects involving Norman Parkinson, who died in 1990, I was delighted to learn he had contributed images to the first two issues of Vogue Australia. I also discovered that the transparencies had survived in the Norman Parkinson Archive, together with an important unidentified portrait. It turned out to be a sitting with actress Deborah Kerr, taken especially for the magazine, in England. It was in anticipation of her travelling to Australia to appear in the film The Sundowners, with Peter Ustinov and Robert Mitchum.
Of most interest was the image used for the first cover of Vogue Australia, which only credits the photographer and not the model. It is in an extraordinary soft focus with an ethereal composition to convey seashell colourings of translucent loveliness, made up of nasturtiums and powdered oranges combined with green eyeshadow and mascara vert. We believe the model is the then 18-year-old Tania Mallet, who was born in Blackpool in 1941 to a mother who was a former chorus dancer and a father who was a millionaire car salesman. Mallet appeared on the cover of two issues of British Vogue in 1961 and was a frequent early 60s model in a number of Parkinson sittings for Queen magazine. Mallet made her film debut in 1961 in Michael Winner’s documentary Girls Girls Girls!, but is most remembered for her role as Tilly Masterson in the James Bond film Goldfinger. She was also a cousin of Helen Mirren, whom she slightly resembled. Sadly, she died earlier this year, aged 77, on March 30.
Parkinson was also the photographer of the second issue of Vogue Australia, a ‘mid-summer’ edition that ran a cover story called ‘A Charm of Cottons from Britain’, together with a full account of Deborah Kerr’s life story to date. For the remaining issues of the year, Parkinson’s work is absent, replaced by images from photographers such as Henry Clarke and Helmut Newton, whose work also had started appearing in British Vogue.
For Parkinson 1959 was a remarkable year: he had a high number of important fashion and portrait photographs appear in the pages of Vogue – British, in addition to Australian. Some of these included memorable images of the American wit Dorothy Parker and dancer Margot Fonteyn, as well as American actor and singer Paul Robeson in Othello. There was also American sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein and, from the new generation who would dominate 60s pop culture, Shelagh Delaney, the 19-year-old author of A Taste of Honey, and the first major pop star to be photographed by Vogue, Cliff Richard, in late 1959, when he was singing Living Doll and being chased in the street. Parkinson’s fashion work included many of his iconic images in this year, such as his interpretation of an Otto Lucas toque hat on model Adele Collins, now known as ‘After van
Dongen’, as it resembles one of the artist’s works. It was also the year Grace Coddington won British Vogue’s young model of the year contest, with Parkinson taking her first photographs, and thereby began a long creative partnership between them.
Most unexpected was Parkinson’s decision to leave Vogue in 1959, having worked for the magazine since 1941. He began the 1960s as associate editor and leading photographer for rival trend-setting magazine Queen and stayed there for the next four years. Parkinson would be lured back to Vogue in the mid-60s and remain there until the late 70s, but that is a different matter. His story continues with the two new books produced this year by ACC Art Books and edited by Iconic Images, Norman Parkinson: Always in Fashion and Always Audrey: Six Iconic Photographers, One Legendary Star, in which many previously unseen photographs of Audrey Hepburn that Parkinson took in 1952 and 1955 are shown for the first time. Terence Pepper is senior special advisor on photographs at the National Portrait Gallery in London, where he previously held the position of curator of photographs from 1978 to 2014.