Pre Facebook or Skype, children were charmingly camera-shy. And nobody caught this better than Norman Parkinson
Norman Parkinson – like his confrères David Bailey, Brian Duffy and Terry Donovan – is mostly known for his spectacular fashion photography.
But as with these other great photographers, the fashion shoot was only a part of their work. That was what earned them money: not necessarily what most satisfied the aesthetic eye of the photographer.
In a new exhibition of images, all relating one way or another to childhood, see how Parkinson combines the techniques of photo journalism – catch the moment as it flies – à la Cartier Bresson or Lartigue, with an Irving Penn-like sense of formality. The child is casual, the picture instant, yet the form severely composed.
Parkinson’s life took him into high places, to royal palaces, tropical beaches, to friendships with the notable and the company of some of the world’s most beautiful women. But always the children, the “real” people, by virtue of their simplicity, caught his attention.
So, in the exhibition, look out for, among many others, names like Attenborough, Windsor, Menuhin, Devonshire – see the scions of the great and famous, cheek by jowl often enough with a Kellogg’s pack or an Andrex roll. “Don’t be too serious”, is the message.We’ll have no pretension, as the mundane is rendered special – just what it was like to be alive and joyous. Parkinson would often deny that what he did was art – that doesn’t mean it wasn’t. Looking at these Parkinson prints, shot between 1950 and 1965, we realise just how times have changed, just how innocent the years were. The hardship of the war was in the past (though sweet rationing wasn’t to end until 1953).
A certain sumptuousness was returning to everyday life, a richness of fabric, a surfeit of flowers, but it was taking its time. Privacy was important: girls wanted to look ladylike not sexy: models wanted to marry peers rather than be “celebrities”. A formality still ruled.
No one, quite, expected their photo to be taken. Faces and settings had to be composed. It shows, and I think it is for this reason these intimate Parkinsonian glimpses of a time past carry such a whiff of nostalgia and charm.
It’s not just that the technology of the camera has changed, and an image can be altered on whim so nothing is quite to be trusted, but that faces and bodies have changed. Once they were innocent, and unprepared; not now. Today, cameras are everywhere. The baby in a buggy, pushed through the shopping mall, will have turned up on a dozen CCTV cameras in half an hour. It was probably scanned a dozen times before it was even born.
Friends and family will have cameras and mobiles out daily in admiration. It’s probably already been seen gurgling on Skype in Australia a dozen times. Before today’s child can so much as walk it will be conscious of its appearance: he or she will be experiencing life from the outside in, not the inside out as life unfolds, as object, not subject.
By six, the girl child will be worrying if she isn’t too fat. Parkinson’s children scarcely knew or cared what they looked like. They were beautiful, but didn’t know it.
I met him once or twice in the advertising agency I worked in at the end of the Fifties. He was charming and ineffably civilised. I was a very junior copywriter, and he was considered very grand – heads turned with the news that he was “in” – but he showed himself pleasant and helpful, more concerned with the work than his own prestige.
We were setting up a Pre-Raphaelite style shoot, all folds of lush velvet fabrics, a beautiful girl, a large brimmed hat covered with roses and a pure glass of milk, which someone spilt. Not me, thank God.
No one shouted. We cleared it up and reset. I can’t remember what it was we were selling but I dare say it was for “Drinka Pinta Milka Day”.
With other photographers it might have gone very differently. Tears, not just milk, would have been spilt. Tensions were running high, egos exploding as eroticism in fashion photography began to take over from the kind of disembodied glamour that typified the Forties and Fifties.
Parkinson was king of that chaste glamour, if soon to be deposed, but what a grace to have known him.
The exhibition 'Parkinson Photographs The Age of Innocence’, co-curated by Fay Weldon and Angela Williams, will be held at Dimbola Lodge, Isle of Wight, from April 8 until July 3;
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