13.08.10
Fashion Photographer Barry Lategan
Fashion, design, music and, of course, photography are always looking to the past for inspiration. Some photographers are repeatedly referenced, others not so often. Barry Lategan is one of those whose time seems to be now. His work looks as fresh and contemporary as it did when he created it more than 20 years ago. Julia Molony met up with him to find out more about his career and inspirations.
I’m due to meet Barry Lategan near his home in south London, but despite detailed directions over several phone calls, I’m struggling to find him. Then, from behind a bus stop, I hear the sound of a shutter clicking. I look around to find him busily engaged in taking my picture. Wearing a dickie bow, and a black felt fedora decorated with a sparkly pink sticker in a heart shape, he cuts a rather eccentric figure. But then, Lategan is not a conventional sort of a man. He has, after all, spent his life in active pursuit of the remarkable and the unusual. How else to explain his light bulb moment when Lesley Hornby, later much better known as Twiggy, mooched into his west London studio in 1966 as a lanky teenager. It was his first, now famous pictures of her, which immediately transformed her into a star.
These now hang in museums – an eternal reminder of Lategan’s landmark contribution to fashion history. He remembers well the fateful moment he photographed the model and tells the story in his free-flowing, slightly haphazard way. “She came to the studio, with her hairdresser Leonard, and she was walking around the studio and he said, ‘stop biting your nails Twigs,’ and I said, ‘what did you call her?’ and he said, ‘Twiggy, because she’s so skinny.’ I said, ‘if you go professional, call her that name.’ So when I phoned Leonard he said, ‘I’m going to cut her hair.’ The next day she came with short hair and painted eyelashes, and I was amazed. I turned around and I said to Leonard, wow! A few days later the Daily Express [fashion editor] Deirdre McSharry phoned and asked where she could contact this girl. I said her name was Lesley Hornby but she had a nickname – Twiggy. So the next day, there was the letter – the face of ’66.” His fashion and beauty editorial shots in the sixties and seventies captured the mood of the age and brought him to the beating heart of the scene. He worked prolifically, contributing a great deal to British Vogue as part of a creative clique that included model turned creative director Grace Coddington, and make-up artist Barbara Daly.
These days Lategan is a sort of troubadour with a camera. Through it, he casts a warm, sentimental eye over the world. Other than when he’s at home, it never leaves his hand. His day-to-day life is documented, almost compulsively, in pictures. To him, taking them is as natural as a reflex. On the short walk to his apartment, he steers me into several different poses – standing in a rose bush, leaning against a wall. It is, to say the least, the most unusual prelude to an interview I’ve ever experienced. His small south London flat is a museum to his extraordinary life and career. The walls are literally covered in shots and mementos, letters from subjects, collections of quotations and articles that inspire and delight him. He spreads a stack of large portfolio folders out in front of me, and what’s striking is the wide reach of his work. Portraits, still lives, fashion, beauty, documentary. He shows me a recent editorial job for a Spanish magazine that commissioned him to recreate the famous first sitting with Twiggy, but in this case with a 16-year-old transvestite. The likeness is remarkable, underscoring further the pouty androgyny which defined the look of the late sixties.
He has kept remarkably good company over the years. His portfolio is populated by the great and the good, Paul and Linda McCartney, Germaine Greer, Margaret Thatcher, Jerry Hall, Sophie Dahl. Camera in hand, he has travelled from the front line of rock’n’roll to the centre of the establishment. Photography started as a hobby for Lategan. He had originally wanted to be an actor, leaving his native South Africa and travelling to the UK as a teenager to train at the Bristol Old Vic. But his plans were put on ice after he was conscripted into the army, and it was while on duty in Germany that he first became bewitched by the startling alchemy of creating a photograph. “This fellow in the air force ranks showed me how to develop a picture in the developing tray, and it dazzled me to see this image come out of a blank paper,” he remembers. Thus began a hobby which soon took on the proportions of an obsession.
Even before it became his vocation, photography was fast turning into the thing that defined him. “There was a form of belonging to yourself with a hobby,” he says. “We function in conjoining with so much of what we do.” His initial interest was in reportage. “The inspiration in my early years were the Magnum photographers. My early idol was W Eugene Smith.” But he followed the money into catalogues and things developed from there. “I developed my style of beauty and portraiture through working with hairdressers for Vidal Sassoon, because hairdressers cut their hair from all these different angles. So I learnt to look at women – not just from the front always, but sideways, and that became a fascination for me. And I’ve used the model almost like a sculptural shape in all my pictures.” It was through his work photographing models for catalogues that he honed his artist’s appreciation of the female form. “I became understanding of how they dressed,” he says, “I got to know sizes of dresses, measurements, cup sizes, waist, inner leg, outer leg. All these measurements were part of choosing a model to do a job. So you learnt to understand the female form and shape.”
Eventually his work brought him into contact with Barbara Daly and Grace Coddington – he photographed the latter before she made the transition from model into stylist and art director for Vogue. It was through Grace that he got his break into the fashion bible. But he credits Barbara with inspiring the style of beauty photography that became his trademark. “Barbara is essentially the foundation of these photographs. I pay great tribute because she understood that I was lighting directly from the front. These pictures do not have retouching. I did not have retouching facilities then. The photographs were used as I photographed them. I used a slightly soft filter on the lens. I used a light into an umbrella behind me, which was shadowless, or I used a ring light. But the shape of the pictures came from the make-up.” The result is what he describes as a linear look. “It has an almost flat dimension. Whereas my fashion pictures gravitate towards three-dimensional.” The effect was to turn the face into a stark canvas – a perfect, if expressionless showcase for the transformational effect of dramatic make-up. The difference with each one is the make-up around the eyes. “I’ve used them with the make-up as a mask. Essentially all these women are in mask face,” he says. “My pictures were renowned for not needing retouching,” he goes on. “Because I lit with this big umbrella. And then I had a silver reflector underneath the model, so the light was flat fronted light. There was no shadow lighting.”
Back in his Vogue days, before gadgets and post-production wizardry became a standard part of the process of creating an image, his signature techniques were his calling card, and, as such, a closely guarded secret. “In my earlier years the reputation of the various photographers – and I include myself in this – was intrinsic in their technique of how they applied themselves to the technique of their filming and lighting. Photographers were individualised. They had individual ways of functioning with the techniques. “Photographers were secretive about how they achieved what they did. I used to put a piece of Sellotape across the lens to make it soft focus, and people were always interested to find out how I achieved that. I used a thin strip across the middle part of the lens, which means the focal point of the lens went into slightly soft focus.” He thinks the advancement of technology may have robbed the craft of some of its magic. “The technique is still there,” he says, “but we’ve mechanised it.” In life and in art, Barry is an avid admirer of women. Not just of the female form – though that, admittedly, provides eternal inspiration. On one wall of his flat, for example, he has on display an ongoing photographic project that aims to capture the perfect poetry of the well-formed female backside. But his appreciation of the feminine goes beyond the physical. “I’ve always looked at the way women sit and stand,” he says, “and my interest has also expanded, or should I say – I have enormous appreciation and feeling for the spirit and power of women. When I say power I mean their innate power to do everything.” He lowers his voice to an awestruck whisper. “I find women can do everything. They can. They do it emotionally and they do it physically. I’ve spent my life, not only through the appearances of how women are, but having the experiences of delivering my own child, of photographing renowned people, to do with women’s ideas and thoughts. I grew up in South Africa at a time when men were in charge of the way women were, or had to be.”
He’s slightly ribald and a bit of a flirt, peppering his conversation with wisecracks. Part of this, he says, is a trick of the trade – the ability to needle and cajole and shock to get a reaction in whomever has his attention. Part of his process as a photographer, he explains, is to “arouse and provoke”. To illustrate the point, he hands me a quotation from novelist Salman Rushdie. “I have seen a lot of photographers work. I remember Barry Lategan, in a natty beret, snapping away during an interview, nodding every time I said something he liked. I began to watch him carefully, becoming dependent on his nods, growing addicted to his approval. Performing for him.”
These days, Lategan’s focus is a return to those subjects that first inspired him to pick up a camera; he’s gone back to documentary and the representational. Currently, his main project is a sprawling study of urban life. “It has to do with architecture, plant life, bicycles. Not just to do with people.” Even in casual conversation, it’s clear he collects memories like pictures, throwing in without elaboration, snapshots or sketches of things he has experienced; the time he delivered his own son, his memories of the wild hedonism of fashion shoots in the sixties, the years he spent living with a professional ballet dancer whose photograph still sits on his wall, these are the images which together form the collage of Lategan’s life. “What I miss so much here,” he says, gesturing around his flat, “is walking around and having someone’s company. When I walk around here I can hear the radio, but I can’t talk to anyone. You know, when you are passing or you just have a thought. But the place here is too small for two. It’s my igloo.” But life for Lategan is still busy. There are photographs to be taken, jobs to be done and events to attend. Without letting his gallantry slip, he bustles me out of the flat. He’s got an invitation to a David Bailey private view, and he wants to get their early. “I want to try and get there before Bailey. Because I have a feeling Bailey may turn up early and then push off.” And then he’s off, hat on, camera, as ever, loaded and ready to shoot.
www.barrylategan.com
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