How Cecil Beaton captured the world

A peak into the unique scrapbooks which reveal the private world of Cecil Beaton. 

In the course of his decades-long career as a photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair, photographer to the royal family, and a British war correspondent, Cecil Beaton documented lives famous and quotidian with his trademark theatrical panache.

His sophisticated, even prescient approach to the cult of celebrity led to innovative staging techniques: subjects were photographed with their heads under glass domes, or wrapped in silver cloth, posed like statues against pillars and thrones.
 

‘I wasn’t sure about the window dressing,’ says David Bailey, whose path he crossed at Vogue and who later made the documentary Beaton by Bailey. ‘But he had this ability to make people look right in their space. He made them look like they'd sat in that chair forever.’