TERENCE DONOVAN (1936-1996)

TERENCE DONOVAN (1936-1996)

Terence Donovan (1936-1996) came to prominence in London in the 1960s as part of a post-war renaissance in art, fashion, graphic design and photography. The energy of his fashion photographs and portraits, and the force of his personality, have assumed in the intervening years an almost folkloric significance. With David Bailey and Brian Duffy, photographers of a similar background and outlook, Donovan was perceived as a new force in British fashion photography. The three comprised a ‘Black Trinity’, according to Norman Parkinson, who found their methodology crude and their pictures at best ‘unpolished’. Donovan was 23 when he opened his studio, Bailey the same age when his first substantial commission came from Vogue. Their early success heralded the era of the ‘specialised hero’, which Vogue and Queen magazines would reinforce – and mythologize – in print. Donovan’s accredited appearance in a star-studded Bailey fashion shoot, for Vogue in 1961, was an early signifier that photographers were now the equal to television stars, comedians and theatre actors. Later, on screen, Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow up (1966) would strengthen the notion of photographer-as-cultural-icon.

Though they approached photography in distinct ways, the three – and others such as John Cowan – remain ciphers for a decade of ambition, energy and opportunism. Cecil Beaton, (like Parkinson, of the generation the three would eclipse) spoke, not entirely with approbation, of Donovan ‘creating such a stir!’ With hindsight, he went further: ‘Donovan’s young girls had no innocence and he somehow contrived to make them look as if they were wearing soiled underwear…’ The new democratic nature of photography and its discomforting effect, was boosted by Duffy’s triumphant assertion that ‘before us, fashion photographers were tall, thin and camp. We're different. We're short, fat and heterosexual’.

As early as 1962, Donovan and Bailey were hailed as ‘masters of the quick and vivid image’ but, to many observers and collectors, it has become clear with the passage of time that Donovan’s inventiveness continued into the following decades. He consolidated his success as a magazine photographer with a parallel career as a documentary filmmaker and with a body of self-motivated projects, such as idiosyncratic nude work and portraiture, landscape photography and, unexpectedly, the documentation of Judo. At the time, little of this reached a wide audience. However, he established himself as a maker of television commercials and pop videos, including that for Addicted to Love (1985) by Robert Palmer, considered to be one of the most influential and memorable videos ever made. In his later years, he developed a love of painting and exhibited vast abstract canvases inspired by Japanese calligraphy.

Donovan was born in East London on 14 September 1936, the son of Daniel Donovan, a lorry driver, and his wife Constance. His education was often disrupted, ‘I spent most of the war’, he once said, ‘in the cab of a large lorry travelling round England’, but he developed an interest in photography, which chimed with a golden age for black and white periodicals, notably Picture Post and Lilliput. Influenced by the documentary work of Bill Brandt, whose starkly black and white photo-essays appeared in both magazines, Donovan brought urban realism to his early magazine and advertising work. His backdrop was the blitzed and cratered landscape of his East End youth, observing that here was ‘a tough emptiness, a grittiness heightened by occasional pieces of rubbish rustling around in the wind.’ While his contemporaries Don McCullin and Roger Mayne found this urban landscape conducive to pure reportorial photography, Donovan brought this grittiness to the depiction of clothes.

This reached an early apogee in a series of men’s fashion pictures taken on the streets of London for Man About Town, published in 1961 and, for the same magazine a year later, a series of portraits en deshabille of the young actress Julie Christie in her London flat. The degree of informality brought to both was untypical of the time (and prompted Beaton’s disapproval). The sense of unobserved scrutiny in the Christie portfolio– the actress’ gaze rarely addressed the camera – appeared voyeuristic (a situation replicated later with the actress Sarah Miles). This approach was explored regularly in his magazine work and up until the 1990s remained a constant for magazines that sought a Donovan imprimatur.

Commercial exigencies as well as expediency for the photographer ensured that studio work was not neglected. As Donovan’s reputation grew, and the financial rewards for commercial work increased, his milieu became more sophisticated and efficient. His studio was able to entertain three, occasionally four, sittings a day. By the 1980s it ran like clockwork, which occasionally gave his work a formulaic feel. However, the best examples repeated a mise-en-scène first formulated in the sixties. He had always avoided the vocabulary of exaggerated ‘high fashion’ postures in favour of a visual language taken from the streets and from the girls of his East End youth. This scrutiny of gesture and stance was, in his own words, a ‘sort of working-class chic’ and it stayed as part of his own vocabulary for almost his entire career.

In 1960 and 1961, again for Man About Town, he contributed two uncharacteristic though influential photo-essays that went on to inform his fashion work. For the first, ‘The Lay About Life’, he documented in grimy detail an artists’ collective in Holland Park; for the second, he trailed a West End stripper for a day, from early morning until late at night. Both were downbeat, the latter conveying the pathos and loneliness of a nascent ‘sex industry’ and the former an almost forensic study of British domestic life lived on the margin. Both were a counterpoint in photographic stills to the prevailing cinematic wave of British ‘Kitchen Sink’ realism: Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was released a month before Donovan’s Holland Park photographs were published; Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey two months after the ‘Stripper’ series. In spirit they appear closer to the domestic interiors and the windblown urban landscapes of ‘new realist’ painters such as John Bratby and Derrick Greaves.

These sets of pictures were enlightening and anomalous, for Donovan chose not to pursue ‘straight’ documentary work thereafter but concentrated even more firmly on fashion photography: ‘I tend to reduce my reportage to graphics,’ he explained later, ‘I don’t really want to report on life...I’m quite happy to see a girl scratching her nose in a coffee bar and translate that via a model.’ This translation successfully found its way to the pages of less experimental magazines than Man about Town, chiefly Vogue and subsequently graphically powerful ones such as Nova and The Sunday Times Colour Section. The latter was almost an in-house magazine for a generation of British fashion and reportage photographers. It first appeared in February 1962 with a composite cover – by Bailey – very much in the spirit of Donovan’s cinema verité style. Donovan himself was a contributor to the second issue.

Except for Elle, art directed by Peter Knapp, foreign magazines received Donovan’s informal approach with coolness, and, as he very much depended upon them for a steady stream of assignments, this had to change. Thus, for French and Italian Harper’s Bazaar particularly, Donovan chose a different tactic. He exaggerated – almost to the point of parody – the hauteur of the high-end glossy magazine. This instinct for the highly colourful, for an ‘overdone glamour’, existed concomitantly with an economy of style, and both kept him in demand from the 1970s to the mid-1990s. Sensing perhaps the inconsistencies in his approach to magazine work, that it was not ‘pure’, he exculpated himself by maintaining a distance from the fashion world: ‘Fashion photography is an act of theatre, and I suppose you really have to love it...’ But his ambivalent, sometimes querulous, attitude to fashion was pursued in two television documentaries on the twice-yearly Paris Collections.

Inevitably, Donovan brought these two distinct approaches to magazine portraiture too. His first photograph for Vogue, for example, a portrait of the conductor George Solti walking the streets of Covent Garden, is a skilful long-lens observation shot, but throughout the 1970s and 1980s and frequently for Vogue, he concentrated on the studio portrait, wherein any element of chance was, for the most part, removed. The results - most particularly a series of headshots of the comedians Max Wall, Norman Wisdom and the writer and wit Osbert Lancaster - are determinedly unflattering with no indulgence to the sitter’s vanity or the ‘look’ of the magazine. From 1970, while continuing to shoot fashion for a variety of magazines, he explored in earnest the more lucrative field of advertising photography, also turning his hand to the moving image.

Donovan was at work until he died in November 1996. He had started preparatory work on the construction of a large studio in West London, while a series of portraits of contemporary musicians for GQ had renewed interest in his editorial work. His last Vogue commission was a portrait of the fashion designers Suzanne Clements and Inacio Ribeiro (‘Clements Ribeiro’) made just two weeks before he died and published posthumously.

Vintage prints of Donovan’s fashion and portrait work, particularly those from the 1960s and 1970s, are rare. Even more so are ‘signed’ works. He belonged to the generation that never considered that there could ever be a market for what was essentially commercial photography, no matter how accomplished. Donovan’s diffidence went further. As a working photographer he spurned compilations of his work or exhibitions of past highpoints, because, presumably, he felt the best was still to come. In his lifetime, he published only three books of his photographs. None was particularly historical nor any an anthology of his greatest moments and all were idiosyncratic. The first in 1964 Women Throoo the Eyes of Smudger Terence Donovan, was a slim booklet of women he had recently photographed (including several Julie Christie and Sarah Miles pictures and out-takes from the ‘Stripper’ series). Glances, the second, coming nearly twenty years later in 1983, was a book of nudes and the third and last, Fighting Judo from 1985, the most unexpected: a ‘blow-by-blow’ manual of judo moves. (Donovan was a black belt 1st dan.

Unsurprisingly, there are few signed prints in the Donovan archive. However, what has surfaced is a cache of contact photographs, curiously authenticated. For the decade 1959 to the end of the 1960s, Donovan separated from his contact sheets, and invariably printed up to the standard of a finished print, those images he favoured for publication – promptly stabbing them clean through with the point of a pencil. This is surely a forceful stamp of authorship and authority from one of British photography’s foremost identities. And one whom, it must be said, made strenuous efforts to avoid a conventional photographic legacy.

copyright Robin Muir 2007