Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} A Maverick Eye The Street Photography of John Deakin by Robin Muir A Maverick Eye: The Street Photography of John Deakin by Robin Muir. A pair of brilliantined males gaze at a young coquette. The first man has a Clark Gable moustache and a quizzically arched eyebrow. The second, older, jowlier, rather Victorian in his wing collar, looks directly into the eyes of the marcel-waved Mae West figure, whose pudgy arms are clasped demurely across her naked breasts. But there is no danger of “wandering hands” from the pair of buttoned-up voyeurs, not least because these men have no hands, nor arms to keep them on. None of the three, come to mention it, have bodies either – below the thorax they are mounted on elegant Classical plinths, like a set of priceless vases. This strange vignette – in the window of a Parisian perruquier – was captured by John Deakin in the 1950s when he, following the methods of his forebear Eugène Atget, would rise at the ungodly hour of five every morning to take photographs, regardless of the quality of light or the weather. Deakin, however, did not see himself as a photographer. It was just a side-project; his great love was painting. He did himself no favours, however, by the company he kept – Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and their circle. They put his small talent into dark shadow. Deakin’s reputation is instead founded on his uncompromising photographs of these friends (many of them no oil paintings), not his dabblings with the brush. “He combined the instant horror of the passport photo with a shock value all his own,” wrote Daniel Farson, the Boswell of that booze- soaked Soho scene. Farson, of course, appears in this book, his blond mop and hefty frame reminiscent of a 1950s Boris Johnson; also present are the louche brothers Bruce and Jeffrey Bernard, poet Louis MacNeice, Bacon’s model George Dyer and Muriel Belcher, foul-mouthed imperatrix of the absinthe-green Colony Room. But it is not Robin Muir’s mission with this book simply to serve up yet another round of the Soho portraits. It was in Paris, after all, that Deakin picked up a camera – it had been left in his apartment after a party – and took his first pictures. The shots taken in Paris and Rome occupy more than two-thirds of the book. And, like the London pictures, they are remarkable for their lack of sentimentality. Yes, there are nuns, priests and decaying monuments, but set alongside graffiti, Baconesque sides of meat, bandy-legged walkers and surreally macabre junk-shop windows. The book closes with Deakin’s pointedly unromantic study of the Victor Emmanuel monument in Rome, a great wedding cake obscured by a spider’s web of tram cables and shrouded in scooter-smog. For too long, much of Deakin’s work has been obscured by a similar fug of cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes. This book succeeds in clearing the air. Under the Influence: John Deakin, Photography and the Lure of Soho by Robin Muir – review. I n the emollient climate of today's portrait photography John Deakin's work presents a bracing corrective. Deakin (1912-1972) photographed celebrities in his heyday, but he never cosseted or flattered them in the manner of a Mario Testino or an Annie Leibowitz. The faces of his sitters, caught in a curious hungover light, loom out at you, bemused, vulnerable, possibly guilty. He called them his "victims", and no wonder. A portrait he took of himself in the early 1950s is revealing, his pinched features and beady gaze suggesting a spiv or a blackmailer out of a Patrick Hamilton novel. "An evil genius," George Melly said of him, and "a vicious little drunk of such inventive malice that it's surprising he didn't choke on his own venom." The inventiveness, if not the malice, is available for inspection in Under the Influence , curator Robin Muir's latest dip into the Deakin archive, which accompanies an exhibition currently showing at the Photographers' Gallery in London. It is a timely book in one way, for it offers glimpses of a Soho – Deakin's stamping ground of the late 40s and 50s – before its tragic fall into respectability. The shop-fronts, the alleyways, the graffiti on walls seize the eye as vividly as the company of artists and writers and boozers who posed for his unforgiving lens. Were he alive today one shudders to think what he would make of his beloved domain, stripped of its inimitable pungency, like a deodorised Camembert. Perhaps he would laugh – one imagines him having a smoker's rasping cackle – given what little value he placed on sentiment. He was estranged from his family for decades, claiming to have been born in Liverpool, "near the leper colony", an early indication of his fondness for tall tales. In fact he was born in Bebington, on the Wirral, near to where his father worked at Lever Brothers in Port Sunlight. He left school at 16, and kicked around Ireland and Spain before returning to England in the 30s; in London he found a rich American patron, Arthur Jeffress, to sponsor his fledgling career as a painter. His early work, influenced by Gauguin and Soutine, didn't set the Thames on fire, though the Observer conceded that he was "certainly earmarked for some sort of reputation". Was he ever. During the war he worked for the Army Film and Photography Unit, dispatched to Cairo, Tripoli and Malta; the scenes he witnessed in the latter fed his ravenous eye for devastation and architectural ruin. He was typically facetious about his war experiences. Finding himself with the unit at El Alamein, he listened as Montgomery warned his men of the superior tank power ranged against them; the worried silence that ensued was broken by Deakin's stage-whispered question, "Do you think we're on the right side?" The end of the war marks the moment when his career – and his legend – properly catches fire. Audrey Withers, editor of Vogue, was so impressed by his street photographs of Paris and Rome that she hired him as a staff photographer in 1947, and quickly regretted it. His offhand manner, his drinking, his indifference to "fashion" and his propensity for losing valuable equipment damaged an already dubious reputation. Withers eventually sacked him, complaining that he was "incapable of taking a good picture of a beautiful woman". (Not true: Gina Lollobrigida never looked lovelier than in his mid-50s portrait of her.) In fact, he would have the honour of being fired twice by Vogue, the second time in 1954, by which time he was riding high as court portraitist and jester to the leading lights of British art. Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, Keith Vaughan, Eduardo Paolozzi and John Minton all went before his camera, as did writers such as Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Smart, Louis MacNeice, Colin MacInnes and Ken Tynan. Most famous of all was his close friend Francis Bacon. The photograph of him stripped to the waist, holding a split carcass of meat, is perhaps the defining image in the Deakin galère ; if it didn't inspire Bacon's own tortured depictions of flesh and bone it surely anticipated them. Bacon, whose face adorns the cover of Muir's first selection of Deakin's photographs from 1996, played an inadvertent role in salvaging the photographer's posthumous reputation. Deakin had pretty much drunk away the 60s, having more or less abandoned the camera in favour of painting. (There are ropey examples of his art in the current exhibition, which underline a truth: it's not the thing you're good at that obsesses you – it's the thing you long to be good at.) He died of lung disease in the Old Ship hotel at Brighton in May 1972 – another Hamilton echo – and his life's work might have gone with him were it not for the admirable foresight of his friend Bruce Bernard, Jeffrey's brother. Bernard visited Deakin's flat in Berwick Street, Soho, shortly after his death and retrieved from under the bed a large cache of photographs, scratched and knocked about in a way entirely typical of their late owner's carelessness. A further tranche of Deakinia was recovered from the floor of Bacon's chaotic studio, these smeared with paint and torn at the edges to lend them an accidental touch of bohemian squalor. Some of these prints, as Muir notes, help to plot the creative coordinates between the photographer and the painter. His shots of the model Henrietta Moraes and of Lucian Freud, for example, were later adopted by Bacon as "memory traces" for his paintings of them. He considered Deakin's photographs to be "the best since Nadar and Julia Margaret Cameron". That verdict may be hard to challenge. However tatty some of these photographs look today, there can be no doubting Deakin's artful handling of composition and light, or the hours he spent in his darkroom getting the grain of his prints just right. Their impact is undiminished; if anything, it has been enhanced by the passage of years. Look at his weirdly unsettling shot of Freud in 1952 and you see something nobody else caught (Deakin described him as "a strange, fox-like person"); or the heartbreaking shot of poor John Minton, face caged in his hands as if he wants to make himself disappear; or George Dyer, another suicide, nervous and dapper on Old Compton Street, two fingers of one hand, touchingly, clasped by the other. You can see that shiftiness in many of his subjects, and one longs to know how Deakin, hovering before them with his camera, created such a mood of unease. The actor Paul Scofield recalled, after an encounter: "I remember thinking uncomfortably that he didn't like me." It seems quite possible that Deakin didn't like anyone very much – he just liked photographing them. This beautifully produced book testifies to a talent that still astonishes. Clapping it shut you will be struck by a powerful sense that when the glory days of Soho are remembered it will be largely through the dark-adapted eye of John Deakin. He climbed inside faces. Nobody who has read the various accounts of Francis Bacon's life could have missed the figure of John Deakin, the small, drunken photographer who made some remarkable portraits of the painters, writers, models and friends who gathered round Bacon in Soho during the 1950s and 1960s, notably at Muriel Belcher's Colony Room. In most accounts Deakin is reviled, not for his drunkenness but for the bitchiness, scrounging and general meanness of spirit that came with it. Bacon - who, according to his friend and biographer Dan Farson, was fond of Deakin - called him "a horrible little man", though he also thought his portraits "the best since Nadar and Juliet Margaret Cameron". George Melly called him a "vicious little drunk", Jeffrey Bernard said he was "a wizened, acned dwarf of a jockey". But Bruce Bernard, Jeffrey's brother, recognised Deakin as a member of "photography's unhappiest minority whose members, while doubting its status as art, sometimes prove better than anyone else that there is no doubt about it". Photography was a second best for Deakin, who had failed to find success as a painter and only took up the camera by accident in 1939 - he is said to have woken up in a Paris apartment after a party, found a camera unattended, and taken it away to try it out. His working life was haphazard - he had two brief periods under contract to Vogue, both of which ended badly, and two small exhibitions in Soho; he produced two guidebooks, one to London, the other to Rome. He more or less gave up photography in the last years of his life, and had it not been for Bruce Bernard, who rescued several boxes of photographs from under Deakin's bed after his death in 1972, the pictures might have gone the way of his other artworks and ended up in the gutter in Berwick Street. In 1984, Bernard made a selection of these photographs for an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum called The Salvage of a Photographer. The creased and tattered prints, many of them portraits of his Soho companions, were to establish Deakin's posthumous reputation. In 1996, Robin Muir, who as the picture editor at Vogue in the early 1990s had found another cache of Deakin's prints, contact sheets and negatives in the Condé Nast library - this time of the artists, writers, actors and directors Deakin had photographed for the magazine - curated a show at the National Portrait Gallery and published a book on Deakin's work. This was four years after Bacon's death, and it included some of the 40 or so trampled and paint-spattered photographs that had been found in Bacon's studio. These were photographic studies Deakin made at Bacon's request of figures he wanted to use as references in his paintings. They included the now well-known sessions with Lucian Freud, Henrietta Moraes and Isabel Rawsthorne, all of whom are recognisable in Bacon's pictures. As well as fuelling the debate about just how much Bacon had relied on photographs, the distressed prints added the glamour of found fragments to what was by now acknowledged as Deakin's increasingly important archive. The 1996 show concentrated on Deakin's portraits. The large close-ups show every pore, pockmark and hair follicle; in most cases the eyes stare directly into the lens, and the face is often squared off prematurely by the frame. They have been described as "cruel" and "brutal", but in fact seem to be more the result of Deakin's impatience with the kind of theatrical gestures and posturing body language that so often makes a portrait false. But there was another group of pictures, found in an annexe down the back stairs of the National Portrait Gallery. These were Deakin's street pictures, taken in London and during his many trips to Paris and Rome - the city he loved most. It is these that Muir has concentrated on in his second book. The difficulty this presents is obvious: how to produce a second book that contains enough information to satisfy those coming to Deakin for the first time, while offering those who know his work something new? Muir has partially solved the problem by retelling the story of Deakin's life in the text - and here there is, inevitably, a certain amount of repetition - and placing the emphasis, in the choice of pictures, on much less familiar aspects of Deakin's work. Of the three sections of photographs, "London" is still largely made up of Soho portraits, though ones taken at more of a distance: most are cropped just above the knee, or full-figure. There is a little series of pictures of Bacon and his lover George Dyer, posing for Deakin both singly and together, one day in Soho in the 1960s; a strong head of the writer Elizabeth Smart; and an awkward full-length picture of Muriel Belcher. There are also a few street scenes - signs, hoardings, shopfronts - in the manner of Atget, which serve as a throat-clearing exercise for what is to follow. After London, the book really changes pace. Paris and Rome seem to have brought out a more compassionate side of Deakin. He is drawn to street people, to shopkeepers and market traders, tramps and beggars, and to the cities' ageing fabric. Before his death he had planned a number of books: one on Paris, another on Rome, and two called "London Walls" and "Paris Walls". And here you can see why. Walls so often provided the canvas for some of his best photographs. Like Brassai, who had begun collecting pictures of graffiti in the early 1930s, Deakin was fascinated by the randomness of street art. Scribbled in chalk, the simple drawings for children's games, the vows of love or hate and the slogans of street philosophers have a fragile, temporary quality that, on the uneven surface, gives them the emotional purchase of paintings. Deakin liked walls on which the commerce of the city had left its mark - layers of tattered posters, or the giant letters of advertising slogans half rubbed out by the weather. In Paris he followed Atget's example of going out each morning at dawn to photograph the empty streets. In Rome he found that the public displays of religion offered fine opportunities for pictures. He used a Rolleiflex, as Bruce Bernard pointed out, with the same ease that other street photographers used a Leica. In his portraits it enabled him to climb inside a face (some of his portraits are close enough to reveal that aqueous millimetre of flesh that lines the bottom eyelid) with what would have been intrusive intimacy if he hadn't know his subjects so well. In his landscapes, it gives ordinary scenes a greater formality. Deakin said of his pictures that he was "fatally drawn to the human race". He probably was a fatalist, but there can be few more life-affirming photographs than the picture of a group of mothers in Trastavere, proudly holding up their children for his inspection. In some ways it might have served Deakin well to have one book that included all sides of his work and all his best pictures. But that's easy to say in retrospect. Somebody who probably never expected to be remembered for his photographs now has a life in two volumes. An Evil Genius Of Inventive Malice: John Deakin Under The Influence In Soho. The documentary portraiture of British fashion photographer John Deakin (1912-1972) from the 1940s to his death in the early 70s garnered a fresh round of appraisal with the opening of the exhibition Under The Influence at London’s Photographers’ Gallery. That coincided with the publication of Robin Muir’s companion book of the same title. Girl In Cafe, late 1950s. (c) John Deakin, The John Deakin Archive 2013. Tony Abbro of Abbro & Varriano, newsagents, 48 Old Compton Street, Soho, 1961. (c) John Deakin, The John Deakin Archive 2013. Muir is Deakin’s foremost proponent, responsible for 2002’s A Maverick Eye . This collected Deakin’s so-called “street photography” in London and on the Continent compiled during bouts of employment for British Vogue . As the title suggests, the book focuses on the inhabitants of the stamping ground most associated with Deakin’s lush life: Soho. On Deakin’s death in May 1972, his friend and subject Bruce Bernard rescued what comprises Deakin’s body of work in this field from a set of tatty cardboard boxes under the bed in his Berwick Street flat. As Muir has written, these contained “hundreds of negatives, torn prints and stained contact sheets wrapped in brittle and desiccated brown paper”. Jeffrey Bernard, Cambridge Circus, London, 1950s. (c) John Deakin, The John Deakin Archive 2013. Partygoer, 1940s. (c) John Deakin, The John Deakin Archive 2013. Bernard went on to organise the first public exhibition of Deakin’s portraits at the V&A in 1983, but a source of frustration for exacting Deakin enthusiasts has long been the imprecise dating of his oeuvre. This is due in part to the rickety life led by the photographer, and exacerbated by the fact that those in his circle who could attest to when portraits were taken – if they could remember – have almost to a man (pace JP Donleavy) hopped off the twig. JP Donleavy, Soho, 1950s. Photograph: copyright 2014 John Deakin Archive. Elizabeth Smart, 1952. Photograph: John Deakin. Copyright 2014 John Deakin Archive. Contact sheet of self-portraits, 1952. (Vogue). Copyright John Deakin/Vogue Copyright 2014 The Conde Nast Publications Ltd. Timothy Behrens, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews at Wheeler’s, Old Compton Street, 1963. Photograph: copyright 2014 John Deakin Archive. Jackie Ellis, actress, 1960s. Photograph: John Deakin. Copyright 2014 John Deakin Archive. And so many of these images will apparently forever now be consigned to decades rather than years, but it is a testament to Deakin’s considerable compositional powers that this lack of detail, which would otherwise provide insights into the development of his craft, does not impinge on the enduring vitality of these photographs. Read more about Under The Influence: John Deakin And The Lure Of Soho here. Copies of Muir’s new book are available here. Would you like to support Flashbak? Please consider making a donation to our site. We don't want to rely on ads to bring you the best of visual culture. You can also support us by signing up to our Mailing List. And you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. For great art and culture delivered to your door, visit our shop. John Deakin. THE STREET PHOTOGRAPHY OF JOHN DEAKIN The reputation of British photographer John Deakin rests chiefly on his remarkable documentary photographs and portraits of the creative souls and maverick talents who haunted the pubs and clubs of London's Soho in the 1950s. Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Colin Maclnnes, DylanThomas . these painters, poets, writers, and others defined an era in the cultural life of postwar England. Less known are Deakin's haunting evocations of life on the streets of London, Paris, and Rome. Here his eye is not cold-blooded or dispassionate but rather profoundly generous, sympathetic to the chaos of postwar urban life. His pictures of lamplighters, fairground workers, dog walkers, priests, nuns, and shopkeepers reveal an empathy to rival that of Doisneau and Brassdi. Equally intriguing are his depictions of the relics of human activity: chalked-up children's games, graffitied messages of love or anger, and the richly textured shapes and surfaces of street signs, peeling walls, window shutters, and shop-front banners. Though a legendary drinking companion in artistic cir- cles, Deakin was not universally popular the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton once described him as 'the second nastiest little man I have ever met.' Yet he was respected by all for his professionalism and his originality. After his death in 1972 his work lay neglected for a number of years. The Street Photography of John Deakin helps restore him to his proper place as one of the UK's finest photographers. Robin Muir is a former picture editor of British Vogue and the Sunday Telegraph magazine. Among his other books are David Bailey: Chasing Rainbows . 'Many of those who, all unwittingly, were his sitters are crushed by life; and the artist quite without condescension or sentimentality sees the poignancy of their desperate will to live in a world that has quite defeated them.' -Colin Maclnnes.