Terence Donovan (1936-1996) came to prominence in London in the 1960s as part of a post-war renaissance in art, fashion, graphic design and photography. The energy of his fashion photographs and portraits, and the force of his personality, have assumed in the intervening years an almost folkloric significance. With David Bailey and Brian Duffy, photographers of a similar background and outlook, Donovan was perceived as a new force in British fashion photography. The three comprised a ‘Black Trinity’, according to Norman Parkinson, who found their methodology crude and their pictures at best ‘unpolished’. Donovan was 23 when he opened his studio, Bailey the same age when his first substantial commission came from Vogue. Their early success heralded the era of the ‘specialised hero’, which Vogue and magazines would reinforce – and mythologize – in print. Donovan’s accredited appearance in a star-studded Bailey fashion shoot, for QueenVogue in 1961, was an early signifier that photographers were now the equal to television stars, comedians and theatre actors. Later, on screen, Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow up (1966) would strengthen the notion of photographer-as-cultural-icon.
This video was directed by the Photographer Terrence Donovan, the clothing and make up was "inspired by Pop art and its bright contrasting colours."
Though they approached photography in distinct ways, the three – and others such as John Cowan – remain ciphers for a decade of ambition, energy and opportunism. Cecil Beaton, (like Parkinson, of the generation the three would eclipse) spoke, not entirely with approbation, of Donovan ‘creating such a stir!’ With hindsight, he went further: ‘Donovan’s young girls had no innocence and he somehow contrived to make them look as if they were wearing soiled underwear…’ The new democratic nature of photography and its discomforting effect, was boosted by Duffy’s triumphant assertion that ‘before us, fashion photographers were tall, thin and camp. We're different. We're short, fat and heterosexual’.
As early as 1962, Donovan and Bailey were hailed as ‘masters of the quick and vivid image’ but, to many observers and collectors, it has become clear with the passage of time that Donovan’s inventiveness continued into the following decades. He consolidated his success as a magazine photographer with a parallel career as a documentary filmmaker and with a body of self-motivated projects, such as idiosyncratic nude work and portraiture, landscape photography and, unexpectedly, the documentation of Judo. At the time, little of this reached a wide audience. However, he established himself as a maker of television commercials and pop videos, including that for Addicted to Love (1985) by Robert Palmer, considered to be one of the most influential and memorable videos ever made. In his later years, he developed a love of painting and exhibited vast abstract canvases inspired by Japanese calligraphy.
Donovan was born in East London on 14 September 1936, the son of Daniel Donovan, a lorry driver, and his wife Constance. His education was often disrupted, ‘I spent most of the war’, he once said, ‘in the cab of a large lorry travelling round England’, but he developed an interest in photography, which chimed with a golden age for black and white periodicals, notably Picture Post and Lilliput. Influenced by the documentary work of Bill Brandt, whose starkly black and white photo-essays appeared in both magazines, Donovan brought urban realism to his early magazine and advertising work. His backdrop was the blitzed and cratered landscape of his East End youth, observing that here was ‘a tough emptiness, a grittiness heightened by occasional pieces of rubbish rustling around in the wind.’ While his contemporaries Don McCullin and Roger Mayne found this urban landscape conducive to pure reportorial photography, Donovan brought this grittiness to the depiction of clothes.
This reached an early apogee in a series of men’s fashion pictures taken on the streets of London for Man About Town, published in 1961 and, for the same magazine a year later, a series of portraits en deshabille of the young actress Julie Christie in her London flat. The degree of informality brought to both was untypical of the time (and prompted Beaton’s disapproval). The sense of unobserved scrutiny in the Christie portfolio– the actress’ gaze rarely addressed the camera – appeared voyeuristic (a situation replicated later with the actress Sarah Miles). This approach was explored regularly in his magazine work and up until the 1990s remained a constant for magazines that sought a Donovan imprimatur.
Source: http://www.chrisbeetles.com/gallery/artist.php?art=1591
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