Terence Donovan
Back in the Fifties fashion photography was all fixed smiles, twinsets and very middle class. Your fashion photographer wore a velvet jacket, perhaps a cravat and was extremely middle class.
But the mini-skirt, Swinging London and the generation gap were just around the corner. Fashion was moving and it didn’t matter how you spoke as long as you understood what was going on.
A working class accent wasn’t a problem, in fact it was a positive advantage, and three East End lads with cameras arrived to document a decade – and to become even more famous than the models they snapped.
David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Brian Duffy – the Terrible Three as they became known – were a bit of a shock at first.
“Bailey turned up to photograph me and brought the model Jean Shrimpton,” remembers jazz musician George Melly. “I was amazed. In those days photographers were posh or gay or both. Here was this blatantly heterosexual, East End lad all in black, who kept using expressions like ‘Lose that arm, chief!’”
Bailey, the son of a Whitechapel tailor’s cutter, decided early on that he didn’t want to follow his jack-the-lad father. Scraping together the pennies to buy a box Brownie camera he would spend hours on Wanstead Flats photographing birds and flowers. “As you can imagine that didn’t go down too well,” he laughed.
Bailey’s teenage nights were spent listening to jazz bands at Poplar Civic Hall or Stratford Town Hall. After completing his National Service Bailey had only two dreams – to be a jazz musician and to take photos. When one of his officers borrowed his trumpet and lost it he was left with only one choice.
It was the right one. As the Sixties wore on Bailey made his name and fortune taking pictures for Vogue.
And in 1968 his fame was complete. He was offered the lead role of the hip young photographer in Antonioni’s cult movie Blow Up. He stuck to what he knew best and David Hemmings got the role, but Bailey was immortalised as the East End lad made good, fashionable and very rich – and the man who made photography sexy.
At the height of his Sixties fame, Terence Donovan was living in a Mayfair flat, next door to Claridge’s. But he never missed his Sunday trip to visit his Auntie Doll and Uncle Bill in the Mile End Road.
Donovan was a lorry driver’s son and when he left Fairfield Road School in his early teens he took a conventional East End career path, starting work in the photo department of a Fleet Street printers.
Like Bailey, he honed his photographic skills during the boring spare hours of National Service and by the time he was 21 was working as assistant to the top fashion photographer John French.
Four years on he had his own studio. Like Bailey, Donovan knew what it was that gave the three East End lads and their Essex mate, Terry O’Neill, an edge over the old guard. “For the first time we did high-fashion shots in a sexy way,” he says.
Donovan, like his pals, was brash and pushy in a way their forebears never were. But he had another theory why they did so well – they had nothing much to lose.
“If you are in combat and you don’t mind defeat, it makes you dangerous,” said Donovan.
“The worse that could happen is we would have had to go back to the East End, where we were happy enough in the first place,” he said.