Brian Duffy - man of ART

Brian Duffy - self portrait

First years


Duffy was born to Irish parents in London in 1933. During World War II he was evacuated with his two brothers and sister to Kings Langley where he was taken in by the actors Roger Livesey and Ursula Jeans. After only three weeks his mother, unhappy about her four children being split up from the family insisted they all return to London. They were evacuated once more to Wales but returned to London having experienced living on a primitive farm after a month.
In 1950 he began  St. Martins School of Art at first wishing to be a painter but soon changed to dress design. He finished in 1953 and immediately began working as an assistant designer at Susan Small Dresses after which he worked for Victor Steibel, preferred designer to Princess Margaret.


Professional career


In 1955 he began freelancing as a fashion artist for Harper's Bazaar. It was here that he first came into contact with photography. Inspired by the photographic contact sheets he saw passing through the art director's desk he decided to find a job as a photographers assistant. Unsuccessfully, he applied for a job with John French, after which he managed to get a job at Carlton studios and then at Cosmopolitan Artists. He left there to take a job as assistant the photographer Adrian Flowers. While working for Flowers he received his first photographic commission from Ernestine Carter, the then fashion editor of The Sunday Times.
In 1957 he was hired by British Vogue where he remained working until 1963. During this period he worked closely with top models of the period, including Joy Weston, Jennifer Hocking, Paulene Stone and Jean Shrimpton.
Apart from Vogue, Duffy also worked for publications including Glamour, Esquire, Town Magazine, Queen Magazine as well as The Observer, The Times and The Daily Telegraph. He also worked on contract for French Elle for two periods the first between 1963 and 1968, and the second between 1971 and 1979.
In 1965 Duffy was asked to create a Pirelli calendar which he shot on location in Monaco. He was commissioned to shoot a second calendar in 1973 which he created in collaboration with British pop artist Allen Jones and air brush specialist Phillip Castle

One morning in 1979, Brian Duffy, then one of the most famous photo-graphers in the world, came into work. One of his assistants told him they had run out of toilet paper. His memory is hazy, he admits, but what happened next became an ­episode of snapper folklore.
"He realised," he recalls in a documentary that airs on BBC4 ­tonight, " that He was making decisions about toilet ­paper. And He thought This has got to end. Either by me murdering my staff, killing myself, or setting fire to the whole fucking thing." So he gathered every negative and transparency he had ever shot and burned them on a fire in his back garden. After that, he never took another picture.
Except, as it turns out, negatives do not easily catch fire. And when they do, they produce an acrid black smoke: this bonfire ended when an official from Camden council peered over the fence and insisted Duffy put it out. Duffy packed what remained away in shoeboxes in his attic and turned to painting and furniture-restoring. It was only in 2007, when his son Chris went through the boxes, that he reluctantly agreed that they were worth another look. This led to a show in London last year – the first, anywhere, of his career.
To devotees of photography, these surviving pictures were like a salvaged stack from the library at Alexandria. Lost portraits of Michael Caine, John Lennon, Nina Simone, William Burroughs, ­Reggie Kray and many more. And ­fashion shots that remind us how this man  created the visual spirit of the swinging 60s: making ­fashion fun, colloquial, young.
In 2009, at the behest of his son, Chris, Duffy resumed work as a photographer and shot images of people he had photographed in the 1960s and  70s.
Duffy died on 31 May 2010, after suffering from a degenerative lung disease

Brian Duffy photos

John Lennon

Arnold Schwarzenegger

David Dowie