What caught my eye towards the end of Look Again was this conversation between David Bailey and the shoe designer Manolo Blahnik. They are talking about a brief golden age, a perfect moment in their lives:
Blahnik: So sometimes I just have to sit down and say: ‘God, did all this happen?’ All the excitement, it doesn’t exist any more, maybe because I’m old.Bailey: It’s not because you’re old. It doesn’t exist.
This is the autobiography of David Bailey, as told to James Fox (‘my collaborator’). It starts with Bailey as a child in the East End, and ends with Bailey returning there as an old man. But the real subject is that golden moment, the compressed excitement of a very short period in cultural history, involving a small number of people, mostly in London and New York. This was the moment that Bailey captured, the moment that lives in the mind’s eye as a series of images. Something seemed to be changing very suddenly, and lots of people loved it.
Bailey was constantly told he was stupid at school. He imagined he’d be a car thief or a hairdresser
Is this right, or is this just the way we remember it? Of course we remember it partly through Bailey’s images — of the Beatles, the Stones, the Krays; of Michael Caine and Jean Shrimpton and Andy Warhol. Something happened. Something was changing — maybe. In any case, people thought the world was opening up, that now everybody could have more sex and fun; you could see this, as well as other things, in the eyes of the people in Bailey’s pictures.
So either something was happening, at that precise historical moment, or something was confected, and either way David Bailey was at the heart of it.
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