'Bailey's Stardust': National Portrait Gallery

Jean Shrimpton. Jerry Hall. Kate Moss…Picture an iconic image of them and the man behind the camera was probably David Bailey. The East End boy who charmed the West End fashion world has been working for Vogue for more than 45 years. But it isn’t fashion per se that that interests him. Talking about how he got started in the Sixties, he says: ‘I thought the best way to sell the frock is through the girl. If the girl doesn’t work, the picture doesn’t work.’ His photography is a love affair – not so much with his camera, but with his subjects.

A landmark exhibition of Bailey’s work opens at the National Portrait Gallery next month. It's one of the gallery’s biggest ever photography shows and a must-see this summer. Bailey’s Stardust, a title intended to reflect that we are all made from and return to ‘stardust’, includes 250 of his most famous portraits from the past fifty years. 

The selection is Bailey's own. The 75-year-old has devoted an entire room to portraits of his wife of 30 years, Catherine, and another to the Rolling Stones. Other highlights include a new portrait of Moss, a playful shot of Hall and the late Helmut Newton in Cannes in 1978.

It’s not wall-to-wall glitter and glamour, though. he has included unseen photographs from his 2012 travels to Naga Hills, in India, as well as photographs from his 1974 expedition to Papua New Guinea and images of those devastated by the famine in east Africa taken in support of the Band Aid charity in 1985. 

There is also a 1957 self-portrait taken during his time doing National Service in Singapore. Sandy Nairne, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, says the exhibition offers 'an exceptional opportunity to enjoy the widest range of the mercurial portraits created by David Bailey, one of the world’s greatest image-makers.’