David Bailey

Published 20th October 2010

David Bailey burst onto the scene in 1960 with his revolutionary photographs for Vogue. Discarding the rigid rules of a previous generation of portrait and fashion photographers, he channelled the energy of London’s newly informal street culture into his work. Funny, brutally honest and ferociously talented, he became as famous as his subjects.

Reviews

He is a monster – but oh, such a compelling one….The Sixties superstar photographer’s entertaining new memoir has been mischievously ghosted by the White Mischief author James Fox. Being an East Ender is a big part of Bailey’s shtick and he has rabbited on about it for years, but never so brilliantly as here, expertly steered by James Fox. Fox is the author of White Mischief who ­carried off the impossible task of getting a memoir out of Keith Richards, who always claimed never to remember anything. – Lynn Barber, DAILY TELEGRAPH.
James Fox, Bailey’s ghostwriter, makes what could be an exercise in self-mythology something far more raw and surprising (in this sense, the book makes a worthy successor to Fox’s last efforts as a “ghost” for Keith Richards’s Life). At times he gives full rein to Bailey’s unreconstructed cockney persona, but eavesdropping on him in the company of old friends and old lovers, we also hear him confront and examine some more complex drivers of his priapic creativity. – Tim Adams, THE OBSERVER.
In the end this book is about the way things are, and the way the mind pictures them, and the difference between the two. It’s extremely enjoyable. – William Leith, THE SPECTATOR 
“Look Again (Macmillan, £20), the photographer David Bailey’s memoir, is a loud advert for the genius of ghostwriter James Fox, who traps Bailey in the amber of his own words, and exhibits him as a narcissistic monster – but never a dull one: “I like single words. Like ‘moonglow’. It’s such a nice word. It’s like a poem in itself. You don’t have to say anything else. Tells you everything. Or ‘c—’. Perfect word.” – Iona McLaren, THE TELEGRAPH 
David Bailey was never one for decorum. The 82 year-old photographer rose to fame in 1960s London with his bold fashion shoots, boisterous working-class accent and bad boy attitude. He cursed out editors, caroused with hooligans and bedded seemingly every pretty girl who crossed his path.
Fittingly his new memoir, “Look Again”, currently out in the UK, is frank, foul-mouthed and utterly fabulous. THE POST