David Steen: Acclaimed Fleet Street lensman
DAVID Steen, who has died aged 79, was one of Fleet Street’s most celebrated photographers, with a portfolio teeming with cultural stars from the 1950s onwards, and a fund of good stories to match.
Steen photographed subjects as diverse as the homeless and the royal family and did many portraits of women, including a famous photograph of Sophia Loren, reclining in a red dress on a hotel balcony. But it was for his portraits of preening alpha males of all descriptions that he became best known. Among others he captured Terence Stamp, gorgeous in pale linen, chomping on a huge and notably phallic carrot.
“He was getting into Buddhism,” Steen explained. “The carrot was an orange symbol, like those Hare Krishnas that dance through Oxford Street in their orange robes. He was very into it.” Rod Stewart was portrayed semi-naked, leering as he reclined in bed, legs spread beneath a flimsy sheet, stroking his cat.
By contrast, a portrait of Oliver Reed captured the actor’s preposterous brooding vanity by portraying him in the library of his stately home draped with a bandolier full of bullets and toting a shotgun.
The photo session, Steen recalled, had started at noon, but had merged into one of the actor’s famous drinking bouts: “At about 11pm Ollie suddenly left and reappeared on horseback. He trotted in, then charged out again through the French windows on to the terrace, jumped over the balustrade and galloped off into the night.”
But Steen was also capable of capturing human frailty. Harold Wilson he photographed in 1963 curled up fast asleep on a train, dwarfed by the commuters beside him.
“You can use strong lights with men,” he observed. “They can take it. When I did Sean Connery in a snooker hall, I brought a torch and shone it at him.”
One of two children, David Steen was born in London on February 16 1936. His father was a Smithfield meat porter, his mother a seamstress. At school he suffered from dyslexia.
His break into photo-journalism came about when the secretary to the editor of Picture Post visited Smithfield to buy some meat. His father asked whether there might be a job for his son, 15, at the magazine and she agreed.
He was sent on his first foreign assignment in 1954, to photograph the film director Otto Preminger in Paris. This, he decided, was the life.
He won first prize in Encyclopaedia Britannica’s best pictures of the year — at the age of 21 — for images of a woman delivering her own baby under hypnosis.
He then worked as a staff photographer on the Daily Mail before going freelance.
Steen’s youthful charm meant that he was often able to persuade his subjects to do things they would not do for other photographers.
In 1960 he was invited to a charity photo shoot of Bing Crosby swinging a golf club outside Claridge’s hotel, but recalled: “He came out and it started to rain. He said, ‘Sorry guys, I’m not going to play.’ ”
Steen sneaked into the lift with Crosby and asked him whether he ever practised shots in his room: “He said he did, so I pulled the ash can out of the lift and he got out a pitching wedge and hit a ball straight into it on the third floor carpet.”
In the 1960s, Steen was steadily building up a huge library archive of famous men. In 2005 he selected 100 images for a limited edition book called Heroes and Villains.
In 1961 he married the journalist Shirley Flack, who died in 2012. He is survived by their two sons and two daughters. — ©
Rod Stewart was portrayed leering as he reclined in bed, legs spread beneath a sheet, stroking his cat