Negatives

Brian Duffy was one of the greatest British photographers ever, standing alongside David Bailey and Terence Donovan as one of the creators of the image of Swinging London. He shot the cover of Bowie's Aladdin Sane, created iconic Benson & Hedges adverts, shot the Pirelli calendars for 1965 and 1973, and helped produce the film Oh! What A Lovely War.

And then in 1979 he gave it all up, burning his negatives, and not taking another photo for 30 years.

His path into photography was unconventional - he came from a working-class north London background, but thanks to a radical project run by London County Council, he was exposed to art galleries, ballet, opera, and other art forms as a child. This took him to art school where he initially studied painting before switching to fashion design (he claimed because he wasn't the best painter and he wanted to meet girls). With this, he got work at Harper's and then London Vogue, getting sent to take photos and helping redefine the look of fashion photography.

BBC4 recently showed a documentary, The Man Who Shot The 60s, about Duffy, with contributions from David Bailey, Joanna Lumley and other people who know or knew him. He's still alive (though not in good health) and friends with Bailey, and he held an exhibition of old and new work in London in late 2009.

The TV program included Duffy visiting the house that held his old studio and talking about the moment he burned his photographs.

NARRATOR: Throughout the 70s Duffy was still in demand, but his 20 years at the top were beginning to take their toll.

DUFFY: 99.9% of my work was advertising: putting cream on babies' bums and rubbing it on; people putting toothpaste in their gob and doing this; putting something on their hair and doing that. That was 99% of my work. Crap.

HIS FORMER ASSISTANT: I think certainly by the time I came to work for him I think he was getting bored. He was still interested in trying new techniques, but there weren't many jobs that we did which I would say extended him.

DUFFY: The people who were hiring me I didn't like. You know it's like being on the game, disliking the men who are fucking you.

We're going to King Henry's Road because that's where I had the studio. And we're going there, which of course will be very exciting for you and for I guess the inhabitants of King Henry's Road.

Now this story might be absolute crock of shit and lies; it's the way I've been able to put it together in my cranium. I came in to start work and the assistant said we haven't got any toilet paper and I realised in a moment, in a flash, a trice: I was now commander-in-chief, managing director, senior partner, making decisions about toilet paper. And I thought, this has got to end: either by me murdering my staff, killing myself, or setting fire to the whole fucking thing.

I asked them all to leave and during the course of that morning decided to burn my negatives. My career went down the bog with a piece of paper.

So here we are, Linda. I set fire to boxes of negs which burned very inefficiently and I stoked them. And finally somebody turned up on the other side of that, that was a wooden fence, said, "What are you doing?" It was obvious what I was doing, burning stuff, and they said, "You can't do that. We're from the council." And so I put it out.

INTERVIEWER: I understand that as you were burning your work that Bailey played a part in all of this. What role did Bailey play?

DUFFY: Absolutely useless. I guess he was driving up the road, so he came in. I think he stood there like a spare dick at an Italian wedding and then said, "Oh, I could look after that for you." I said, "Don't bother," and then - went. Somebody later said or he said to them he helped me save them. He did no such thing. See that's the sort of turd he is.

INTERVIEWER: It was an incredibly significant moment in your life, wasn't it?

DUFFY: Not really, no. Just one thing I didn't want to do any more, that's all. When anything's destroyed people will wonder what was there. Well, it could have been a crock of shit that I left, worse than the stuff we've still got. Everybody think it might be full of gems.

(Transcribed from TV by myself)

In the 1970s most of his work was for advertising. Although he loved the technical challenges of creating complex images, he didn't seem to view his work as art and was slightly bemused by the way that a camera is an art-making machine that can be used by anybody. Photography is the closest of all art forms to advertising, even more so than filmmaking. This post follows another entry on lost books, TV, and music.