David Bailey Comments

A while back David Bailey destroyed a lot of his negatives, but some were retrieved by a neighbour, although a lot were lost. He is not the first photographer to do this deliberately, and will probably not be the last. David Bailey gave up photographing for some time, but was persuaded back into taking photographs again. I have included an image of Bailey with a mobile phone containing a camera, and of course, he was famous for advertising cameras. I have included one of his latest image, being the one of Euan McGregor, so he is still producing works. David Bailey was one of the forerunners in changing the style of photography in the 60’s, and photographed many of the famous appearing at that time, both in fashion and music. Eg He teamed up with Jean Shrimpton and looked all over New York searching for locations that reflected the dynamism of the city at that time. It is almost inevitable that someone like Bailey, and the recognised photographers form the 30’s onwards, that he worked for magazines such as Vogue style. In fact, his career took off while he was a photographic assistant at the John French studio when he was contracted as a photographer for Vogue magazine They seemed to have created a stream of photographers over a long period of time, which has allowed likes of David Bailey to create and influence all those that have followed that period. This period was also the era when there was similar ground breaking work in advertising, again allowing great scope for the likes of Bailey to be creative and different. He also had some controversial images as well, the best known being that of the Kray twins. This is another exquisite image by Bailey, he's taken a famous person (Jack Nicholson), got him into a fun pose, but only that controlled the light extremely well, to really mould the face. This is another key feature in Bailey's photographs. With his photographs of men he usually uses strong directional lighting, to pick up every line about the face, and gets them to pull strong fun poses. With women it is usually softer, less harsh lighting, to really give a soft, beautiful look to the skin. I shall post two more pictures below to emphasise this, the second being a self portrait by Bailey, which is just an excellent image of himself. David Bailey first took up photography when he was in his national service with the RAF, after the appropriation of his trumpet, he looked for other creative outlets, and bought a Rolliflex camera. Later he was determined to follow a career in photography and also bought a Canon Rangefinder camera, and he became a second assistant to David Ollins.a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigyTKyu4Nky0ErjI43FcsAE_gXvePuvn6MHpq5k0kJ5QL6vzVObr7YzssC5da7ReNRTodAySnAwb2iHj9DGRibIrTku2RqD7ONWRoavQ6g1pHL-kBdfReMJJahMQOi7JmbmdW1OgHJcrtw/s1600-h/as.jpg">