David Bailey (b. 1938, London) is one of the most influential British photographers of the post-war period and a defining figure of 1960s London. Beginning his career at British Vogue in the early 1960s, Bailey developed a direct and graphic approach to portraiture that broke with the conventions of traditional fashion photography. His images of artists, musicians, actors and models captured the emergence of a new generation in which fashion, music, art and celebrity increasingly overlapped.
Published in London by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1965, David Bailey’s Box of Pin-Ups is one of Bailey’s most iconic early projects. Rather than a conventional book, it consists of thirty-six individual halftone portraits presented as loose sheets in a box, accompanied by text by Francis Wyndham. The subjects form a remarkable portrait of the cultural landscape of the period, including Mick Jagger, John Lennon, PaulMcCartney, David Hockney, Rudolf Nureyev, Terence Stamp and the Kray twins. Photographed largely against plain backgrounds, they are stripped of narrative context and presented with the same immediacy and visual authority. By transforming these figures into contemporary “pin-ups,” Bailey created both a portrait of Swinging London and a document of the changing nature of fame, masculinity and popular culture.