"The best (portrait photographer) since Nadar and Julia Margaret Cameron." - Francis Bacon
John Deakin is today acknowledged as one of the greatest British photographer’s of the twentieth century. However his vintage photographs are incredibly rare, so rare in fact that until this exhibition there does not seem to have been a selling show since 1956!
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The photographs offered here were believed lost until their recent rediscovery. Many were included in Deakin’s 1956 exhibition of his Paris photographs and several were previously unknown. Taken together these familiar and unfamiliar images provide an insight into one of the most acclaimed aspects of Deakin’s work, his street photographs, as well as also including unpublished pictures of the Moulin Rouge and of Pablo Picasso.
By the mid 1950s Deakin had established himself as a successful fashion and portrait photographer who, in two stints at Vogue magazine, had gained a reputation for his cruel brilliance and maddening unreliability. However, whereas posthumously his reputation would rest, in particular, on his portraits of Francis Bacon and other Soho luminaries, in his lifetime it was his street photography that received the greatest critical acclaim from the likes of Colin Macinnes and David Sylvester.
This made it especially sad that these prints appeared to have been lost. Robin Muir, Deakin’s great champion, wrote of his
regret that "Deakin's street photographs appear mostly to have slipped from view... Dan Farson lamented particularly the loss of his series on the 'clochards', the down-and-outs of Paris." (Robin Muir, A Maverick Eye: The Street Photography of John Deakin, 2002) Fortunately, this new exhibition reveals several of these "lost" photographs which are presented here for the first time since 1956.
Deakin included many of these Parisian street photographs in his very first exhibition, John Deakin's Paris at the Archer Gallery in 1956 and also used them to try and secure a publisher for his proposed book on Paris. Just as his two lifetime exhibitions focused on his street photographs of Paris and Rome, so his book projects were focused on geographically-based urban reportage: John Deakin’s London Today was published in 1949 and John Kininmonth’s Rome Alive with forty photographs by John Deakin appeared in 1951. So it was natural for Deakin to then propose a book on Paris, especially as the quality of his photography had risen so greatly by the mid 1950s that his Parisian works far surpassed the pictures of London and Rome that appeared in his two previous publications. However, the project did not find a publisher and the majority of these vintage photographs lay in a box, undisturbed, for seventy years.
What these photographs reveal is a photographer at the height of his powers, a flaneur with a particular, peculiar eye.
