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Arguably Britain’s greatest ever portrait photographer, David Bailey is selling off his original Polaroid photos for £1,000 a piece. Signed and sealed in individual envelopes, these miniature portraits are available to buy at his latest exhibition – a retrospective of pop and rock photos from the 1960s to the 21st century.
The only catch is, it’s a lucky dip. Buyers will have to pick their Polaroids – some from light tests, while other projects were simply shot in that medium – at random. It’s a sign of just how treasured this great photographer is.
A key figure in the 1960s London fashion and celebrity scene, Bailey helped present the image of the Swinging Sixties n d es to the rest of the world.
His keen artistic eye and effortless charm endeared him to many of his subjects, allowing him to photograph celebrities from The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, David Hockney and Michael Caine to dancer Rudolf Nureyev, notorious East End gangsters the Krays and, much later, even the Queen.
With Her Majesty, who he photographed in 2014, showing her smiling happily, he famously forgot all about strict royal protocol, addressing her during the shoot as “Girl”.
“She was easy to talk to,” he remembers of that occasion.
“She was charming, so I didn’t have to worry about what I said. Everyone felt comfortable. She had a great personality. She was kind of cheeky.”
Bailey is reminiscing about his 63-year career in a hotel bar in London’s smart Mayfair district, while promoting his stunning new exhibition.
Dotted around the bar and lobby are 25 of his most arresting pop star portraits: The Stones, Queen, David Bowie, Bob Marley, Bruce Springsteen, Grace Jones, Elton John and Kate Bush among many others.
The only catch is, it’s a lucky dip. Buyers will have to pick their Polaroids – some from light tests, while other projects were simply shot in that medium – at random. It’s a sign of just how treasured this great photographer is.
One of the largest is a 1965 image of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the former seeming to rest his chin on the top of the latter’s head. “I thought they hated each other,” Bailey says, seated beneath the two Beatles. “There was a lot of tension there.”
Somehow, however, he has captured a moment of closeness and affection. This was five years before the band broke up, and it looks as if the two men are still friends.
“Maybe they were,” Bailey adds. “Maybe my judgement was wrong.”
Nearby is a charming photo of the rock band Queen, taken around the time of Live Aid in 1985.
Bailey remembers lead singer Freddie Mercury ambushing him off stage at the concert and giving him a sloppy kiss.
Another photo shows American rocker Alice Cooper posing with his band, a naked baby wearing shocking eye makeup, and huge bundles of cash. It was an out-take from the cover shoot for the band’s 1973 album Billion Dollar Babies.
“We actually had a million dollars in cash in the studio for the shoot,” Bailey recalls. “Afterwards the bank counted the whole lot, and there was 10 dollars missing.”
The banknote was later found smouldering on a photographic light.
There’s also a portrait of the famously antagonistic Gallagher brothers from rock band Oasis.
“I worked quickly as I wanted them out of the studio,” Bailey says. “I thought they might kill each other.”
Everyone, even his closest family and friends, always call him Bailey, rather than David. He says it stems from the early 1960s when he started dating the model Jean Shrimpton.
“She went out with a load of public schoolboys before she met me. They were known by their surnames so I got lumbered with ‘Bailey’.”
While Bailey was dating Jean, at the same time Mick Jagger was going out with her sister Chrissie, also a model. “I pity their father,” Bailey says, admitting he and Jagger were hardly perfect boyfriend material.
At one point, Shrimpton’s disapproving father even threatened to shoot him.
Bailey has been married four times over the years, first to a typist called Rosemary Bramble, then to the French actress Catherine Deneuve (“for a 10-bob bet”, according to his autobiography), later to American model Marie Helvin, and finally to English model Catherine Dyer. He and Dyer have been together since 1986.
An upcoming collection of Bailey’s portraits of her, called 117 Polaroids, is due to be published in the coming months. “The average Polaroid takes a few minutes to develop,” he says. “This book has taken nearly 40 years.”
Bailey may now be 84 but he’s almost as busy as he was in his heyday. As well as the exhibitions, there are two other photo books soon to be published – one a tribute to east London, where he was born and bred; the other “a gritty yet affectionate vision of rural and small-town Australia in the early 1980s”.
He also accepts personal photography commissions and the odd commercial photo shoot. Otherwise, Bailey spends his time between his studio in Bloomsbury, in central London, his home in north London and his second home on Dartmoor, Devon.
He admits he finds life in the capital much more fun.
“London is the best city in the world. I’ve never lived anywhere as great as London. But Dartmoor… if I was a sheep, I probably wouldn’t mind it, sitting around eating grass all day long in the freezing cold. But it’s not too good if you’re a human being.”
One benefit the countryside does offer, however, is the chance to paint. During and since the Covid lockdowns he has produced a great deal in this medium – much of it in bold, colourful, figurative styles; some of it with an obvious nod to his great artistic hero, Pablo Picasso.
Four years ago, Bailey was diagnosed with vascular dementia.
“It’s a f***ing bore but it’s just one of those things,” he said recently. “In some ways it’s good: I can see a film and forget it, then enjoy it again two years later. And it doesn’t seem to affect my work at all.”
Despite the diagnosis, he retains all the charm, the razor-sharp wit and the artistic eye that first catapulted him to fame back in the 1960s.
- Bailey: Vision And Sound, in collaboration with the Dellasposa Gallery, runs at 45 Park Lane, London, until the end of January 2023
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