When rummaging through a bomb-ravaged East London post-WW2, photographer Terence Donovan found enough raw creativity to shapeshift British culture forever. And that is just what he did, once he exposed the myth that ’the camera never lies’.WORDS: ERIK SEDIN
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Imagine yourself flipping through a British fashion magazine or brochure from the 1950s. Once you reached the men’s fashion pages, you’d be introduced to jolly old chaps in tweed coats, probably posing with rifles or walking sticks at a rural manor. If photographs from London emerged, you would have had to settle for walks in Hyde Park or affluent life in West London. |
Jimi Hendrix, 1967 |
After a rather fractured education and switching schools more than ten times, Donovan quit school at only 11 years old. He was too young to become a truck driver like his father, or a cook like his mother, but his family had heard that his uncle Joe made some good money as a lithographer. He started studying at the London County Council School of Photoengraving and Lithography. For a while, it looked as though lithography would be his chosen career, but that changed when he discovered photography at 15 years old. After discovering the wonders of making pictures come to life on blank pieces of paper in the dark room, Donovan was obsessed. Photography also helped him to overcome his shyness, having to ask strangers and colleagues if he could photograph them. His first darkroom was a cupboard and Donovan couldn't afford a red light so he used to have a bit of cloth handy and the cloth used to catch fire. Donovan’s passion eventually landed him assisting jobs with leading photographers like Michael Williams, Hugh White, John Adrian and, finally, the legendary John French.
“I used to get up at eight o'clock, work in the studio from nine until seven at night, go out and have a bite, come back at nine, develop all the negatives of the day, contact them and go home at 1.30. That's how you learn how to do the job. You know what they say in the SAS, '’Train hard, fight easy’”, Donovan told fellow photographer and filmmaker Martyn Moore in 1996.
Advertising Shoot For Terylene, 1960 |
Twiggy, 1966 |
At 22 years old Donavan felt that he had gathered enough experience and opened up his own studio in 1959. He hit the London streets to shoot portrait and fashion photography of his own, wholeheartedly uninterested in following the path of the fashion photographers before him. Donovan’s iconoclastic and sometimes irreverent photography brought to magazines and advertising a new visual language rooted in the world he knew best — the streets of London’s East End. Taking his models to bomb-ravaged waste ground or balancing them off steelworks and iron bridges, his gritty and noir-ish style was more like reportage than fashion photography. Magazines and the public alike were awestruck by Donovan’s masterful way of combining contradictions. Haute couture with East End, soft and hard, light and dark. Far from the tweed-clad gentlemen in rural settings.
For the whole of the 1960s, Donovan set the tone for a vibrant and height-of-cool London, known today as the Swingin Sixties. Together with his two business colleagues and friends David Bailey and Brian Duffy, not a single artist, actor, or model escaped their cameras when in town. 30 year older fashion and portrait photographer Cecil Beaton dubbed Duffy, Bailey, and Donovan as ”The Terrible Three”, alluding to the up-and-coming photographers’ raw and edgy editorial photography, the opposite of the formal and static photography of Beaton’s time. Terrible as they might have been, their photos started a revolution in photographic thinking.
“There’s a famous story that Princess Diana was nervous to have her picture taken, to which Donovan took a £20 note out of his wallet, waved it in the air and said ‘Smile at mother-in-law’, making her laugh in the process"
Thermodynamic, 1960. Fashion Shoot For "Man About Town" |
Celia Hammond, Queen,1963 |
As the cultural pendulum of the Swingin Sixties eventually stopped to a halt, Donovan entered the 1970 and 80s with a new focus on advertising and motion. He directed plays, documentaries, and music promotional videos over the decade and even though the money was great, he occasionally returned to fashion editorials for magazines and newspapers. He was still driven by the passion he found in the 50s, and his portraiture legacy was still strong enough to draw the attention of the upper echelon of British society. In the 80s, both prime minister Margret Thatcher and Diana, Princess of Wales sat down in front of Donovan’s lens. At 15 years of age, a poor and shy Donovan used his camera as a tool to approach people of London’s East End, and the witty locals taught him the art of banter and chitchat. There’s a famous story that Princess Diana was nervous to have her picture taken, to which Donovan took a £20 note out of his wallet, waved it in the air and said ‘Smile at mother-in-law’, making her laugh in the process. Donovan got his pictures of the Princess, and had once again used his artistry to make his camera skew reality.
By the mid-90s, Donovan was a senior figure in British photography, a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, and a photographer to the Royal family. He was also appointed Visiting professor at Central St Martins School of Art. In 1996, shortly after his appointment at the art school, Donovan sadly ended his own life because of depression. He left behind him a wife and three children, and an everlasting photography legacy. In 1963 he told photo model Jean Shrimpton that ‘photography fascinates me. Instant fascination every time. When the fascination leaves me, I’ll give it up.’ Since it never did, his fascination accompanied him to his last breath.
Julie Christie, 1962 |
Sean Connery, 1962. Advertising Shoot For SmirnoffVodka |