BAILEY’S ORIGINAL
As David Bailey brings his new exhibition to Scotland, Susan Mansfield tries to get behind the lens of a legend
David Bailey’s reputation precedes him. There was the time he opened an interview by asking the journalist (female, of course) how many men she’d slept with. Or the one where he greeted the writer (male) by telling him he looked like a long, thin streak of piss. His propensity to provoke, flirt, or even hit his opponent for a reaction is legendary (he once called Margaret Thatcher “Toots” for a dare).
That accounts for a certain nervousness in those promoting Bailey’s Stardust, the exhibition which looks set to become the summer blockbuster at the National Galleries of Scotland, and a highlight of the Edinburgh Art Festival. Bailey wants to vet the credentials of any journalist seeking to interview him. He will only do interviews in person. Oops, no, he’ll only do them on the phone. And, whatever you do, don’t use the word “retrospective”.
So, it’s with some sense of trepidation that I open a conversation with an innocuous comparison of the weather in Edinburgh (hot) and London (“quite chilly”). At 78, Bailey is one of the best-known photographers in the world, and has a level of celebrity (and don’t use that word either, by the way) close to that of the people he photographs, and a corresponding distrust of the press. While he is the one behind the lens, he is also the man calling the shots.
“I never do what anyone wants,” he says, his quick voice, defiantly East End, on a warpath of his own making. “If people want me to do a picture, they have to accept what I do. I don’t try and please people, and they don’t get a say. The pictures I send them are the pictures they get. If I bother to send them.”
He has made new prints, he says, for the Edinburgh showing of Bailey’s Stardust. “A lot of people don’t like my prints, but I don’t print by the book, I print depending on the subject and the negative. Some say the prints are too dark, but if they’re too dark they’re too dark because I’ve printed them like that on purpose. It’s just the way I see things at that moment.”
In the moments when he forgets to be belligerent, Bailey is insightful about photography and his approach to it. “Reprinting is like playing a different orchestration, the negative’s the score and the print’s the orchestration. Simple as that, really. A piece of music, whether it was written in the 18th century or the 21st century, still needs an orchestration. So it’s always about now. I’m only interested in now. You print completely differently in different periods of your life.”
Bailey’s Stardust – a version of the show which was at the National Portrait Gallery last year – is the biggest exhibition of his work to date. It covers more than 50 years of images (although we’re not using the “R” word) in a career which has ranged across fashion work and portraiture, from documentary shots of London’s vanishing East End to tribesmen from Papua New Guinea with bones through their noses. It will also include a “show within a show” of Bailey’s paintings and sculpture.
Christopher Baker, the director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, who is “not curating” the show (Bailey himself is the “curator”, I’ve been told this several times) says the exhibition promises to
explore aspects of the photographer rarely seen. “We associate him with these insightful portraits of major figures, but the real revelation for many visitors will be the global and international photography, in places such as Papua New Guinea or the Naga Hills. These are very adventurous projects, and the photography that emerges from them is great contemporary global photography. People are going to enjoy seeing the Bailey they know, and a lot of other material too.”
The Bailey we know is the man who shot the 1960s, the Cockney geezer with a rough-diamond charm and a louche, snake-hipped beauty who hung out with the Rolling Stones, slept with supermodels, became, reputedly, the model for the snapper in Antonioni’s 1966 film Blowup. And the stories, the stories: he got into bed with Andy Warhol (while making a film with Lew Grade), he taught Rudolph Nureyev to do the Twist, he photographed Reggie Kray’s wedding. And on, and on.
Bailey, however, is having none of it. “There are other periods beside the 1960s,” he says, in something approaching a snarl. “There’s the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s and now. I don’t know why you journalists go back to the 1960s, like it’s a renaissance of all times. I’m not interested in looking back.”
Nevertheless, bear with me for a moment, Mr Bailey, because I am. The son of a tailor from Leytonstone, Bailey grew up in the Blitz and was dismissed at school because he suffered from severe dyslexia. He loved art, however, and he began to take photographs: one of the earliest in the show is a picture of his parents taken with a box brownie camera on Margate beach in the late 1940s. After returning from National Service in the 1950s, he got himself a job as an assistant with fashion photographer John French, and within a year was having his own fashion photographs published in newspapers and magazines. Later, he would say (twinkly eyed and halfjoking) that he was simply interested in cameras and girls and this was the best way to combine the two.
Certainly, it’s no secret that he slept with many of the women he photographed, and had liaisons with some of the most beautiful women in the world. After a brief marriage at the age of 20, to Rosemary Bramble, a typist, he married Catherine Deneuve, then Marie Helvin, and had long relationships with models Jean Shrimpton (the Kate Moss of the 1960s) and Penelope Tree. His fourth “and last” wife Catherine Dyer, the mother of his three children, a model some years his junior with a dark, ethereal beauty, features in several photographs in the exhibition. A seminal work was A Box of
Pin-ups in 1965, a snapshot of the 1960s which included portraits of the Beatles, Mick Jagger, Michael Caine, Jean Shrimpton and the Kray twins, against white backgrounds. “I prefer simplicity. I don’t want to clutter my pictures with information that’s not interesting. That’s why I prefer plain backgrounds, it’s about the subject, not about the tree in the background. I can live without a tree in the background.”
Tim Marlow, director of artistic programmes at the Royal Academy, a former director of exhibitions at White Cube and a friend of Bailey, says: “The idea of having no background is really interesting, because he was himself part of a group of people with no background, he came from nowhere in terms of the conventional British class system, as did most of the artists and musicians and writers of the 1960s, it was the democratisation of British culture.”
A Bailey shoot is a dynamic thing. He says he never starts with a preconceived idea of the picture he wants. Marlow, who has been photographed by Bailey, says: “He wants the process to reveal what he wants, and that’s a very
I don’t want to clutter my pictures with information that’s not interesting
smart way of working. He generates a reaction and the photograph is somehow a reflection of that moment. He pushes you. He wants a reaction and he knows how to get it. He bollocked me for laughing too much once, I glared back and he got the image. It became a goodnatured battle, I think ‘Can you just shut the f*** up?’ was one line he used. But I don’t think it’s quite as simple as wanting a confrontation. He’s not looking for weakness, he’s looking for some semblance of who that person is. He wants the person to try to be themselves.”
Bailey isn’t of a mind to be drawn on his subjects. Surely, some must be more interesting than others? What about politicians, especially the bland, Eton-educated ones we get today, does he find enough to interest him there? “Of course I do, they’re as interesting as anybody else. Just because you’re a politician doesn’t make you not interesting. Everybody’s got a story, so you just try to find the story.” Even David Cameron? “He’s alright. Nice bloke. It’s no different photographing him or photographing a pop singer, they’re all the same to me, they’re all people.” But people who are photographed all the time, Johnny Depp, Jack Nicholson, David Bowie, people who have masks to wear, is that more difficult? “No, I don’t think so. I think most photographers don’t take very interesting pictures. I know photographers who don’t even talk to their subjects, I find that completely ridiculous. I talk to the people more than I take their picture. The same thing has happened in photography that has happened to art, that everybody thinks they can do it, but they can’t, thank God.”
But when Kim Kardashian publishes a book of selfies, does that not alter the rules of the game in celebrity photography? “Who?” barks Bailey. “Is she the one who had her arse made bigger? Well, that hardly qualifies as a great achievement. It hasn’t changed anything. It hasn’t changed an iota. It might to the stupid press and to stupid people, but it hasn’t changed anything in photography.”
Bailey seems almost pathologically afraid of sounding pretentious about his art. He will say he “doesn’t give a monkeys” about composition, but he admits he spends a lot of time looking at art, particularly Renaissance painters “to see what I can steal. Not copy. Copy’s no good. Stealing’s okay.” Tim Marlow says: “In as far as Bailey takes anything seriously, which deep down he does, art is a serious matter for him. He spends a lot of time looking at art and thinking about art. I’ve had more intuitively interesting conversations with him about Velazquez than with certain Velazquez scholars, he has that visual intuition. I think some of his strongest works are his portraits of artists.”
Bailey has been blessed with a lifelong, restless curiosity, whether to embrace the latest possibilities offered by technology, or to head off to some of the most remote parts of the world to photograph tribal peoples (most recently a gruelling trip to Nagaland in 2012). At 78, he is neither set in his ways nor showing any signs of slowing down. “I just want to explore everything. The last things I’ve done have been print things on leather. I did pictures of some cows and I thought it would be very funny if I’d printed them on leather. Everything’s curiosity, everything’s ‘let’s see what happens if we do that’.” He has collaborated with artist Damien Hirst (he’s in the show, photographed naked
Everyone has a story, so you just try to find the story
next to the carcass of a whale): “We get on very well because we think a lot alike, but also I find him interesting.” His work’s all about death, though, isn’t it? “Most art is about death, yeah, most artists are interested in death. Most of the renaissance painters, there’s a skull in there somewhere, doll. I’ve been photographing skulls for as long as I can remember. I have a collection, I’ve got about 100 skulls.” In the introduction to Bailey’s
Stardust, Sandy Nairne, director of the National Portrait Gallery, writes that Bailey’s work is “an extended meditation on our place in the world”, the moment captured by the camera in a way reminds us of the passage of time. Recently, he left a series of his photographs exposed on Dartmoor to be weathered by the elements, then framed and exhibited the results.
Does one’s interest in these things change as one gets older? “I don’t know, I never think about getting older, I just think about the moment we live in. I don’t know what getting older means.”
In any case, Bailey shows no signs of retiring. “Why would I do that? I can’t imagine why I’d want to do that. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to do it, unless they do a job they hate. And mine’s not a job, mine’s a passion. I don’t look back, I look forward. You can’t change the past, but you can maybe have an influence on the future. It’s all a new adventure. Only boring people look back.”
Bailey’s Stardust is at the Scottish National Gallery, the Mound, 18 July-18 October, tickets £11/£9, www.nationalgalleries.org See Page 22 for further photography events this summer