The image was right there in front of him, and David Bailey couldn't resist molding, changing, correcting it. His wife, Catherine, had just walked in near the end of an interview focused mainly on his career as a photographer, and she sat nearby, quietly listening from a mock tiger-skin couch.
"I wouldn't sit there, darling," Bailey said, interrupting himself. "The light is terrible."
He laughed, as he had in intermittent chuckles and giggles throughout the talk. The British photographer-filmmaker rarely gave interviews now, perhaps as a lingering reaction to the overexposed personal life he led as the most celebrated portrait photographer in Swinging London of the 1960s. But the opening of his first Los Angeles solo exhibition was less than an hour away, and Bailey made an exception.
The 54 works on display at the Fahey/Klein Gallery through April 6 were culled from nearly three decades and offer a startling diversity of styles. Less than half the exhibition has been devoted to the early black-and-white portraiture that first established his reputation, capturing the still-young and often brooding faces of actor Michael Caine, rock stars Mick Jagger and John Lennon, artist David Hockney and others. Most of the gallery's wall space was left to Bailey's more personal recent work, experimenting with figure studies and still lifes, sometimes mixed within larger paintings and collages.
And yet, still photography was long ago brushed aside in favor of filmmaking as the central activity in his life. Bailey, now 53, has remained a contributor to the pages of Vanity Fair magazine, and recently shot portraits for a Gap clothing stores ad campaign. But he's grown comfortably obscure in the last several years as the mainly anonymous creator of hundreds of television commercials in Britain and America.
Bailey said he's never regretted his gradual move away from photography, adding: "It's good when you move out of something, because you can see it clearer. It's much easier for me to look at photography now that I'm not so involved in it."
There is also little regret over his loss of the intense fame that early in his career made him as recognizable in London as many of his celebrity subjects. His brief 1966 marriage to model Catherine Deneuve, along with Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film "Blowup," purportedly based on Bailey's glamorous life and relationships with fashion models, all conspired to re-create him as a pop culture caricature.
"People overlook that you might be quite good at photography as well, if you have too much of that kind of life," he said. "They see you more as a playboy rather than as a serious photographer. I never felt it stopped me any way artistically if I had a beautiful girl in bed at night."
It was during that era of personal notoriety that Bailey was nonetheless creating a body of work establishing his style, colliding formality with a brash youthfulness, while documenting the faces of his time. Among those in the exhibition is a 1966 portrait of the rock band the Who, its four members crowded into the frame in a mix of innocence and gloom as the young faces emerge upward from the shadows. Nearby is a 1964 Mick Jagger, his face and fully ripe lips caught within a fur parka.
A 1965 photograph of Andy Warhol portrays the artist as strangely raw, unfamiliar to those expecting Warhol's customary cold and distant image. His face lunges subtly forward, mouth agape, as his body tapers out of the frame from sharp, angular shoulders. Warhol was a recurring figure in Bailey's work, notably in a 1973 documentary that was initially banned from British television.
"It's difficult to know someone like Andy," recalled Bailey, who was introduced to the then-unknown artist by a New York art director in 1961. Bailey later had tea with Warhol's mother.
"He thought I was very glamorous," Bailey said. "In fact, he said he wouldn't do an interview with me for my documentary unless I went to bed with him. So we filmed the interview in bed together. It caused quite a stir at the time."
Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown has known and worked with Bailey for about 15 years from the time she was editor of England's Tattler magazine. And she remembered a 2-day road trip in Bailey's Jeep, traveling from London to Paris and back during an airline strike to shoot a 1981 cover of Deneuve.
"It was very funny," Brown said. "What impresses me really is that he will go to any length to do a shot. He wasn't daunted when he found there was an air strike."
When the magazine needs a portrait from England, where Bailey lives most of the year with his wife and two small children, the photographer is usually offered the assignment first, Brown said. His "sharpness and vitality" continues in his contemporary work, she said, even as his reputation remains rooted in the '60s.
