In January 1962, David Bailey photographed Jean Shrimpton on the streets of New York during a winter so bitterly cold, the fashion editor cried all the time, and the camera stuck to Bailey’s fingers. He didn’t have a camera assistant, Shrimpton did her own hair and makeup and they all took cabs to locations because there was no car or driver.Those were the days.
“Now fashion shoots are like Spielberg films—perfected mediocrity!” says Bailey, the East End snapper who, in the early Sixties, helped turn fashion photography on its perfectly coiffed head and later did the same with celebrity photography. “There’s no Avedon woman anymore, no any kind of woman. The models are generic, perfect and sexless. The only Vogue with sex today is French Vogue.”The 69-year-old Bailey, who’s wearing a burnt orange baseball cap, combat trousers and an old army green sweater, is pacing around his London studio loft, casting an eye over the layout of a Damien Hirst shoot in Mexico, tapping at the computer and drinking miniature cans of Diet Coke before settling down on a leather sofa to cuddle Pig, his white Jack Russell.
Related Articles
Staring down at him from the opposite wall are his own poster-size photographs of John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol and Cicciolina wearing a pair of white wings. There’s also a picture of Bailey, on a bus, looking over Adolf Hitler’s shoulder. More on that later.
You May Also Like
Don’t misinterpret his comments about models: Bailey is still in love with photography; he just hates what fashion magazines have become. It’s one reason he’s so proud of his latest book, NY JS DB 62, a collection of 27 photographs from that fateful trip to Manhattan, due from Steidl in late April. The shoot was Bailey’s first time in New York and a big test for the photographer, who had been at British Vogue for just more than a year.
Bailey’s idea was simple: He was going to shoot Shrimpton—a swingin’ Sixties icon with whom he was having an affair at the time—as a girl on the street. No stiff, stylized poses, no pretense or formality, as was the practice then. “I wanted to make Jean look like Jean—real and not a model. I didn’t even want her to be glamorous, just natural,” he says in a Cockney accent of which he’s proud. “This was going to be a rough-on-the-streets shoot.”
To enhance the mom-and-pop aspect even more, Shrimpton carried around a big stuffed teddy bear that someone had given to her on the plane flight over. It’s no wonder British Vogue’s then–fashion editor, Lady Clare Rendlesham (a name that alone sums up the great divide the East Ender Bailey was bridging), was always in tears. He snapped Shrimpton in a phone booth in Chinatown, on the street leaning against traffic signs, in a shooting arcade and, bundled in a suede coat, beside the Brooklyn Bridge. Not surprisingly, he has dedicated the book to Shrimpton, his first muse.
“In my lifetime, there have only been two models with democratic appeal—models that men, women, gays, dogs, parrots all love—and they are Jean Shrimpton and Kate Moss,” he says. “They’re not scary beautiful, like Christy Turlington.”
This article is an excerpt from WWDScoop, a special publication of WWD available to subscribers.