Five portraits by Terry O’Neill: Practitioner of the ‘slow duet of portraiture’
Design For Living, on 17th May, features a group of five portraits by photographer Terry O’Neill (1938-2019). O’Neill’s peers included David Bailey, Terence Donovan, Patrick Lichfield and Anthony Armstrong-Jones – an illustrious, high profile coterie whose work was to be particularly associated with the fashions, film stars, celebrities and lifestyles of the free wheelin’ 60s.
Terry O’Neill was born in the East End of London and left school in 1952 at the age of 14, his sights were set on becoming a professional jazz drummer and even at this young age he regularly appeared with combos on the London music scene. However, he wanted to pursue further study with the renowned drummers of the US East Coast and worked out that free passage to New York would be possible if he became an air steward. At BOAC O’Neill started out as a trainee in the technical photographic unit, and attended courses at art school where he became captivated by photojournalism. The training ground of London Airport provided him with an abundance of material – well-known national and international figures in transit, invariably off guard, in the unglamorous setting of a departure lounge. One such traveller was the Home Secretary, Rab Butler, whom O’Neill shot whilst sleeping in 1959; the image was bought by the Sunday Dispatch and published on their front cover, and O’Neill was then offered a part-time job as the paper’s photographer based at the airport and with this his jazz drummer dreams faded.
By the early 1960s O’Neill was working at the Daily Sketch, the leading picture paper of the time and a crucial calling card as his career developed. We tend to see this decade as a time when all convention and antecedents were thrown out, the reality was of course more subtle – on a personal level O’Neill adopted a polite and professional stance with his subjects, whilst producing informal, spontaneous and innovative portraits which appealed to emerging bands such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. This relaxed and natural attitude consistently characterised his work and he became much in demand, his own star began its ascent and O’Neill took the decision to become freelance. His images were soon published by publications such as Look, Life, Vogue, Paris Match and Rolling Stone. With access to many well known subjects he was now in a position to shoot those whom he also admired and his images were widely seen throughout the 1960s and 70s.
In the introduction to the 2006 Chris Beetles exhibition catalogue, Terry O’Neill in St James’s – The Art of Photography, Dylan Jones, then the Editor of GQ magazine, wrote of O’Neill, ‘His forte is satisfaction, making the famous look as though they deserve their good fortune. He isn’t in the business of shattering egos.’.
In our group, film stars Anthony Quinn, Orson Welles, Brigitte Bardot and Raquel Welsh are shot during breaks in feature film making, in images from 1967 to 1970, whereas rock and roll pioneer, Chuck Berry, is caught during the making of a documentary film to celebrate his 60th birthday. With the four actors we see something of their film characters, as they are in costume and on or just off set, but O’Neill also shows us a glimpse of their own personalities: Quinn and Bardot both look wistful and contemplative, whereas Welles and Welsh, although more closely in role, have allowed a little of their acting to slip. Chuck Berry is likewise not performing, his out of focus right hand reinforces a live wire, energetic portrayal – one feels that O’Neill would have struggled to catch Berry in repose.
Terry O’Neill identified the mid-1980s, when he moved back to England from the States, as the period when he turned to colour, as ‘nobody wanted black and white any more’ – the 1970 Raquel Welsh shot from Myra Breckinridge is an early example of his use of colour. On his preference, O’Neill commented,, ‘…black and white is always more natural, more journalistic’.
As Dylan Jones said in the 2006 Beetles catalogue, ‘A Terry O’Neill photograph is always about the subject rather than being about Terry himself…a gift…which many current photographers have either not received, or are not interested in’.
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Property from a Hampshire country estate | Design For Living, 17th May 2022 at 2pm
Browse the full online catalogue here | View the page turning catalogue on issuu.com here
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