David Bailey

Description

The name of David Bailey is synonymous with photographs of beautiful people. Through his long and extraordinarily successful career, he has focused his camera on many of the most sublime faces of our time. Among Bailey's hundreds of magnificent color photographs is a special pantheon of pictures. Known in fashion magazine parlance as "beauty" photographs, these show the world's most famous models presenting the "look" of the moment, the face that represents the apex of beauty for that particular time. Like the rainbow, this beauty comes and goes -- it is fickle and ever-changing. Yet Bailey has spent a lifetime chasing these rainbows and, more than any other photographer over the years, has succeeded in capturing the iconic faces of each era, those most admired by women and desired by men. In this latest celebration of his art he brings together for the first time the best of all these photographs from the 1960s up to the present day. Commissioned by the finest fashion magazines of the time, most notably Italian and French Vogue, these portraits of what Vogue famously called "The Bailey Kind of Girl" include models such as Jean Shrimpton, Marie Helvin, Jerry Hall, Penelope Tree and Bailey's wife, Catherine Bailey. But Bailey's idea of beauty does not end with fashionable women. It encompasses such pillars of contemporary culture as Yves Saint Laurent, Helmut Newton and Manolo Blahnik, as well as startling ethnographic portraits of, for example, Asaro mud men and Indian dancers. And Bailey's strangely haunting paintings -- published here in book form for the first time -- reveal at their heart an abstract kind of beauty. Robin Muir's text charts Bailey's meteoric career from his first days at Vogue up to today and reminds us of the many ways in which for over forty years Britain's best-known photographer has challenged our notions of female beauty with his own highly personal vision. No admirer of either beauty or Bailey will want to be without this book.

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