Why aren’t my photos in the Tate, asks David Bailey
HAVING immortalised the faces of Kate Moss, John Lennon and the Queen, photographer David Bailey has helped to shape the cultural landscape of Britain.
But the former Vogue snapper, who also shot Jerry Hall’s wedding to Rupert Murdoch this month, has now accused old Blighty of neglecting his lifetime of hard work and enduring talent.
‘The French, the Germans and the Americans were much quicker to understand photography than the English,’ laments David, 78.
‘I think I’ve had one picture in the Tate and not much more in the Royal Academy.
‘It doesn’t really matter, but then you get a thing like the Turner Prize for art, which gets everyone overenthusiastic for something with not much thought behind it, while photographers such as Don McCullin and David Montgomery haven’t received enough attention.’ Bailey, who was born and raised in East London, admits he struggled to break into the industry and was rejected by the then London College of Printing because he’d dropped out of school.
His career only kicked off when, in 1959, he became an assistant to London snapper John French, shortly after which he was contracted as a f ashion photographer f or British Vogue magazine.
‘I had an exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery with David Hockney and Gerald Scarfe in around 1969, and another one there recently — so that’s more than 40 years between shows,’ he adds.
The recent exhibition — the critically acclaimed Bailey’s Stardust i n spring 2014 — included shots of Swinging Sixties stars such as John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Michael Caine.
But Bailey himself was as much a part of the era as he was i ts chronicler, and his fast-moving love life resulted in four marriages. His current wife of 30 years, model Catherine Dyer, is the mother of his three children — Fenton, Sascha and Paloma.
Reflecting on his neglected artistic predecessors, he says: ‘It’s just the same as it used to be with watercolour paintings, with the likes of William Blake.
‘ People would be of the opinion: “Oh, it’s something rich ladies do at the weekend.”
‘For a lot of people, taking pictures has just been something done by eccentrics.’