Terence Donovan was a celebrated photographer and film director, perhaps best remembered for his fashion photography of the 1960s, or for the music video to Robert Palmer's "Addicted to Love".
He was born in Stepney in the East End of London, and took his first photo at the age of 15. The bomb-damaged industrial landscape of his home town became the backdrop of much of his fashion photography, and he set the trend for positioning fashion models in stark and gritty urban environments.
Along with David Bailey, he captured, and in many ways helped create the Swinging London of the 1960s: a culture of high fashion and celebrity chic. Both photographers socialised with actors, musicians and royalty, and found themselves elevated to celebrity status. Together, they were the first real celebrity photographers.
Donovan shot for various fashion magazines, including Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, as well as directing some 3000 commercials, and a 1973 movie Yellow Dog. He also made documentaries and music videos, and painted.
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.
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.
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 . 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.
Donovan committed suicide in 1996 after suffering depression as a result of steroids he'd been taking to treat a skin condition.
Terence Donovan photos:
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.
Donovan committed suicide in 1996 after suffering depression as a result of steroids he'd been taking to treat a skin condition.
Terence Donovan photos:
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