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| "Self Portrait," photo duffy © duffy archive |
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| "Reggie Kray and Grandson," photo duffy © duffy archive |
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photo duffy © duffy archive |
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| "Jane Birkin," photo duffy © duffy archive |
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| "Twiggy," photo duffy © duffy archive |
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| "Jean Shrimpton," photo duffy © duffy archive |
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| "Joanna Lumley and Son," photo duffy © duffy archive |
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| "David Bowie," photo duffy © duffy archive |
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| "Sammy Davis, Jr. and May Britt," photo duffy © duffy archive |
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| "Keith Waterhouse," photo duffy © duffy archive |
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| "John Lennon," photo duffy © duffy archive |
I want to thank Chris Duffy and The Duffy Archive for their kind cooperation and permission to reporduce Brian Duffy's work on my Masters of Photography blog.
Brian Duffy biography and obituary from The Telegraph:
Brian Duffy, the photographer who has died aged 76, was a central figure in the visual revolution that echoed the wider changes in British society during the 1960s.
With David Bailey and Terence Donovan, he formed what was dubbed the "Black Trinity" by Norman Parkinson, the photographer whose pastoral style seemed to embody all that the young trio wanted to challenge. If Bailey was the most creative of them, and Donovan the most amusing, the art school-trained Duffy was the most provocative and intellectual. "Before 1960 the fashion photographer was tall, thin and camp," he reflected. "But we three were different: short, fat and heterosexual."
Their outlook helped to replace a fashion Establishment built on deference with one that worshipped youth and celebrity: the people who wore the clothes became as important as the garments themselves. Influenced by Duffy's street-based locations, magazine images also started to reflect a more real, more urban way of living than the idealised fantasies of Irving Penn or Cecil Beaton. Above all, they were more sexualised. Famously, Duffy shot an article for Nova entitled "How to undress for your husband", using a model – Amanda Lear – whose true gender was then the subject of much gossip.
Many of those whom he photographed – Terence Stamp, Christine Keeler, Harold Wilson, the models Paulene Stone and Jean Shrimpton – have since come to be seen as defining personalities of the decade. Duffy's pictures of them, however, have not.
Characteristically, this was the result largely of Duffy's refusal to treat with the world on any terms but his own. In 1979, having solved most of the technical problems that had originally interested him in the medium, and tired by its increasing commercialisation by advertising firms, he burned the greater part of his archive in the garden of his studio in Primrose Hill. He did not take another photograph for three decades.
He had never showed at a gallery or collected his images in a book, and the growing nostalgia for (and boom in value of) his contemporaries' work during the last 20 years passed him by. Duffy instead devoted that time to restoring Georgian furniture, and it was only last year that he allowed his son to organise an exhibition in London of what had survived the bonfire.
Brian Duffy was born on June 15 1933 in North London but grew up, as the eldest of four children, in East Ham. His parents were Irish Catholics, his father being a cabinet-maker who had been imprisoned for his involvement with the IRA. During the war years, following a brief period as an evacuee taken in by the actor Roger Livesey, Duffy roamed the bomb sites of London.
Then, at 12, he was sent to a progressive school in South Kensington which aimed to draw latent creativity out of troublesome children by exposing them to the arts. Frequent trips to the National Gallery fostered a love of painting in Duffy, and in 1950 he won a place at Central Saint Martin's. He was quickly intimidated by the talent of his fellow pupils – though not before grasping the need for artists to portray themselves as intellectuals – and switched to fashion design. This would later help him when photographing clothes, as he knew how they were constructed.
In 1955 he was offered an apprenticeship with Balenciaga in Paris, but the news of the imminent arrival of his first child necessitated his seeking steadier employment. He began working as a fashion illustrator for Harper's Bazaar, but, after seeing a contact sheet of photographs on a desk, thought them an easier way to make money and "to make women look good".
By 1957 he had found a post at British Vogue. The first job he was given was to take a portrait of Otto Klemperer, the conductor. As he was leaving, Klemperer asked Duffy if he usually left the lens cap on while shooting. But the darkroom covered for his error by pretending to spoil the film and Duffy was given a second chance.
With the support of Audrey Withers, the magazine's politically radical editor, and of Clare Rendlesham, its aristocratic but forward-thinking fashion editor, Duffy quickly prospered. His simpler style and youthful aesthetic became that of the magazine, whilst paradoxically infusing photography with something of the glamour hitherto reserved for the cinema.
Yet, though keenly aware of his market value, Duffy was not contented simply by success. In 1963 he left Vogue so that he could work from his own studio, and two years later began a long association with French Elle, whose artistic leanings corresponded more closely to his own. Meanwhile, with David Puttnam as his agent, he took on more advertising work.
One memorable campaign was for Benson & Hedges cigarettes. Influenced by Magritte, and playing on the brand's gold colour, the packet was seen instead of a canary in a cage, or as a lump of cheese outside a mouse hole. In the days before computer-aided editing techniques, the pictures presented considerable problems of scale and lighting. If the playful imagery exemplified Duffy's visual style, then perfectionism, to the point of intimidating assistants and models, characterised his approach to work.
Other significant commissions included two calendars for Pirelli, in 1965 and 1973, the latter a collaboration with the artist Allen Jones, although the two fell out over the degree of latitude Duffy gave himself in realising Jones's preliminary sketches. Duffy also shot the covers for three of David Bowie's albums, most notably Aladdin Sane (1973), which amply reflected the singer's theatricality.
Duffy's growing disillusion with photography was signalled as early as the late Sixties, when he set up a film production company with the novelist Len Deighton, a friend from art school. It made both Only When I Larf (1968) and the musical Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), but Duffy found that he had little time for the self-indulgences of actors.
Brian Duffy, who died on May 31, is survived by his wife June and their two sons and two daughters.
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