Brian Duffy’s insights into the embryo of modern pop culture

The British photographer Brian Duffy’s presence during the Swinging Sixties helped to document the birth of modern pop culture. But during an impulsive strike of disenchantment, Duffy chucked all his negatives in a bonfire to distance himself from his art. As the decades have passed, his son Chris Duffy is piecing together The Duffy Archive to highlight the art that escaped death.

WORDS: ERIK SEDIN, PHOTOGRAPHY: BRIAN DUFFY

The late Brian Duffy was a general practitioner within photography, and a productive one. His 20-year-long career included seven-day work weeks photographing fashion, advertising, portraits, beauty, music, reportages, and any other assignments that came his way. Duffy’s biggest legacy does however belong to his virgin years, the Swingin Sixties, when he cut his teeth documenting a vibrant and height-of-cool London. Together with fellow photographers David Bailey and Terence Donovan (dubbed ”The Black Trinity” by Norman Parkinson), Duffy innovated “documentary” fashion photography, a style which revolutionized the fashion industry itself.

In the 1960s photographers were in high demand, and were sometimes the true stars of a shoot. Superstars like John Lennon, Nina Simone, Sammy Davis Jr, Joanna Lumley, and others had to adapt to Duffy’s unorthodox and chaotically organized photography process. Actress Joanna Lumley has explained how the studio would be filled with wine bottles and books after a shoot was done, and that she was demanded to sing in order to get the right facial expression out of her. In a way, Brian Duffy seemed to be frightening to people around him in his photographic prime, almost untouchable.

“Duffy’s technique of photographing people was very personal. It's not a relaxing situation to have a lens stuck in your face. He was fascinated by what people thought of the world, and he would research people meticulously just to argue with them. People completely forgot that they were being photographed!” explains Chris Duffy, son and co-founder of The Duffy Archive, an archive made up of negatives and contact sheets that have been retrieved from publications like Vogue, French Elle, Glamour, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, and more.

“Duffy’s technique of photographing people was very personal. It's not a relaxing situation to have a lens stuck in your face.”

Even though The Duffy Archive is laden with iconic photographs like the David Bowie Aladdin Sane album cover and several frames from the three Pirelli calendars Duffy shot, most negatives and films have, quite literally, gone up in smoke. One morning in 1979, Duffy walked into his studio to learn from one of his assistants that they were out of toilet paper. Having built up a frustration with modern photography for years, and having pushed the boundaries of photography as far as he could, this minor setback was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Duffy fired his two assistants and secretary on the spot and started emptying boxes with decades worth of negatives into a massive pile in the back garden. Then he set it all in flames.

“If you’ve ever burned celluloid film, you’d know that the plastic creates a thick poisonous smoke. Eventually, a neighbour popped his head over the garden wall and told him to put the fire out. When Duffy didn’t, someone called a council worker that fortunately came by and ordered him to stop the fire, saving some of the negatives”, says Chris Duffy. In hindsight, Chris accepted his father’s rash decision when the smoke had cleared.

“He felt like he was on a hamster wheel and would take on advertising gigs just to make ends meet and get all his employees paid. He shared that hamster wheel with people he didn't really respect, he didn’t want to be a part of that. He had this idea that to move on, you have to burn your bridges. He got bored very quickly, and always wanted to do something new. He had already made his part for photography”.

“He felt like he was on a hamster wheel and would take on advertising gigs just to make ends meet and get all his employees paid.”

From that day forward, Brian Duffy shied away from his unique artisanry and cultural status. Chris, also a professional photographer by that point, would spend the following decades trying to convince his father to highlight his magnificent career and portfolio. His remaining negatives stayed in boxes under the stairs until 2007, when he was diagnosed with a condition called pulmonary fibrosis. The doctors said that his condition would be lethal within five years. Before his death in 2010, the father and son would together go through the remaining archive.

“When he was diagnosed I convinced him that he should do something with his archive. I would scan everything and then Duffy and I would go through everything and rate every picture from one to five. A picture of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, or Michael Cain would get five stars. One by one we found the key pictures to use for the archive” says Chris, admitting that it’s been a tough pill to swallow accepting how much is lost.

“Duffy was good friends with John Lennon. I think he photographed him at least half a dozen times in the sixties, but we only found one session. I can’t imagine what was burned that day.”

To this day, Chris Duffy is sourcing the brilliant photography of his late father and adding pictures to The Duffy Archive. Chris has gone through Elle’s extensive magazine library, taking his time to find any issues which might have featured his father. After flipping through decades worth of 200-page magazines, he learned to recognize his father’s style. “We’ve been finding so much stuff on eBay that we’ve bought in the last ten years. I find new pictures all the time. Unfortunately, all of his originals were sent to the clients, so a lot of that stuff got thrown away when magazines closed down and such. All we can do is scan the magazines in that case. And printing was pretty rubbish in the 60s, so some images have bad colouring and small resolution.” Brian Duffy’s accolades speak for themselves. He has been voted as one of the topmost 100 influential photographers of all time, and his work has been awed by millions of people at international institutions like Museo Nazionale Alinari della Fotografia in Florence, Centro De Historias Museum in Zaragoza, The V&A and National Portrait Gallery in London. Still, Duffy never saw any pride in his work. In BBC’s documentary Duffy — The Man Who Shot The Sixties he referred to 99% of his work as rubbish, and that “there’s no such thing as art photography, it’s just work. Like being a plumber!”. When asked about the Aladdin Sane album cover, one of the most recognisable pop images ever, Duffy said ”it’s competent, but not much further than that”. “When he looked at his body of work, he would look at it and go ’yeah that's okay. Let’s move on.’ He would never look back in awe of his images, he would always try to improve them. He put it in a box and moved on” concludes Chris Duffy.

“There’s no such thing as art photography, it’s just work. Like being a plumber!”