7 Highlights From David Bailey’s Long-Awaited Memoir, ‘Look Again’
If fashion is craving authenticity more than ever, its poster boy might still be David Bailey. The photographer’s life and work has, from the start, been saturated with the stuff – a fact highlighted by his (long overdue) autobiography, Look Again, released on 29 October.
When I visit Bailey in his studio – where he’s surrounded by a team, including his diligent son, Fenton – he’s reluctant to wax too lyrically about the glamorous world he’s thought to have single-handedly created in the 1960s through his work for Vogue. This reluctance is partly informed by the vernacular dementia he has recently begun to develop – laughing at the irony as he struggles to recall the name of the condition. Indeed, if there is one disparity between Bailey in the book and Bailey in real life, it’s that no recognised punctuation can replicate the rasping schoolboy laughter that punctuates his speech.
Why stop and reflect now, then? “I remember I read Keith Richards’s biography [Life] and thought that was really well written, it had his voice,” Bailey says. “Love that expression: ‘had his voice’, like they’re vampires – Dracula taking his voice!”
Richards worked on his gritty and glistening autobiography with James Fox, who in turn assisted Bailey on this book and appears in transcripts of conversations between the photographer and a host of friends, relatives and collaborators. Make no mistake: the book isn’t an octogenarian’s self-serving of humble pie: he is quite happy to take credit where he deems it due, be that as a man who wooed Catherine Deneuve or as a photographer gently denouncing hero-rivals Irving Penn and Richard Avedon as “completely sexless”. Idols, conquests, detractors – all get their moment, and the reader is left feeling as Bailey must himself have: right at the centre of it all.
David Bailey1/7August 1964
“The first picture I took of Mick [Jagger] – which British Vogue wouldn’t use, and which came out in American Vogue when Diana Vreeland was editor, in 1963 – was taken in Paris, before the Stones had even made a record. He’d come to Paris to be my assistant, as a laugh. Mick was quite rude to people, which I liked.”
David Bailey2/7June 1965
“You have to create your own values in a way, out of the chaotic mess of the universe. Many of mine came from Hollywood glamour, from those hours and hours with Glad [Bailey’s mother] in the cinema. I guess that’s why I like black and white so much. Black and white is the colour of photography. It’s the colour of dreams. Eighty per cent of people don’t dream in colour, they only dream in black and white.”
David Bailey3/7September 1966
“It was Jean [Shrimpton] who started calling me Bailey and after that I was lumbered with it. It wasn’t megalomania on my part, that I wanted to be known by my surname, it was accidental… When I took the first pictures of her she was all arms and legs, like Bambi on the ice, but I realised her arms always went in the right place, her hands were always in the right place, and she always knew where the light was. Everything about her was perfect.”
David Bailey4/71967
“Budgets were double in America what they were in England. England’s always been a bit on the cheap side. But most of all there was Vreeland, probably one of the most extraordinary women I’ve ever met – along with Penelope Tree and Grace Coddington. I didn’t know intellectuals, I never knew people like writers, who I’m sure I would have been fans of. Vreeland wasn’t intellectual but she knew them all.”
David Bailey5/7September 1966
“I loved working with Grace. I respected her. I thought her whole way of looking at the world was fantastic. Once on a shoot in Tunisia she brought along a broom to sweep the sand dunes, to make sure they were perfect.”
David Bailey6/7April 1967
“‘I bet she wouldn’t marry you,’ said Duffy, being evil as usual, trying to get me married. I said ‘I bet she will.’ ‘I bet you 10 bob she wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘All right, I’ll ask her.’ We drove, me and Duffy, to Normandy to the set where Catherine was always making a film in France. Anyway, she came running across this cornfield when she saw us, and I said, ‘Will you marry me?’ And she said yes.”
David Bailey7/7June 1974
“Marie [Helvin] changed my style of taking pictures – it changes every time you use a woman as a muse. Jean changed my style, Sue Murray changed my style, Penelope – all women change your style because you change for them.”
