John Deakin
Encyclopedia
John Deakin was an English photographer, best known for his work centered around members of Francis Bacon's
Soho
inner circle
. Deakin had wanted to be a painter, and doubting the validity and status of photography as an art form, he did not hold his photographic work in high esteem; many of his photographs have been lost, destroyed or damaged. Bacon based a number of famous paintings on photographs he commissioned by Deakin, including Henrietta Moraes on a Bed.
A chronic alcoholic, Deakin died in obscurity and poverty, but since the 1980s his reputation has grown through monographs, exhibitions and catalogues.
on the Wirral
and attended West Kirby Grammar School. Though he had wanted to be a painter, he began to take photographs in Paris in 1939, when fashion illustrator Christian Bérard
introduced Deakin to Michel de Brunhoff, editor of French Vogue
. From 1940 until 1945, Deakin served in the British Army Film Unit as a photographer, where he photographed the Second Battle of El Alamein
.
After the War, Deakin enjoyed two periods of employment as a staff photographer on the British edition of Vogue. The first period, from 1947 to 1948, ended in dismissal when he lost several valuable bits of photographic equipment. His second period from 1951 to 1954 also ended in dismissal, but during those three years Deakin was at his most active. He enjoyed the support of Vogue editor Audrey Withers, even though he disliked fashion photography. Deakin excelled at portraits of leading figures in literature, theatre and film. His subjects included Dylan Thomas
, John Huston
, Luchino Visconti
and many other artistic celebrities. Deakin recognised this work was his true vocation when he wrote:
Notorious for his "his blistering personality, bad behaviour and total disregard for others", Deakin was later fired from Vogue for a second time, "after turning-up with one too many hangovers". George Melly
paid him a double-edged compliment when he wrote that Deakin was "a vicious little drunk of such inventive malice and implacable bitchiness that it’s surprising that he didn't choke on his own venom. And yet such was his wit, his vitality, his delighted relish in his own self-destruction that we find him irresistible."
published a book of Deakin's Rome photographs, Rome Alive, with text by Christopher Kinmonth. Deakin spent many years trying unsuccessfully to publish a book of his Paris photographs, but they were exhibited in 1956 in David Archer's bookshop in Soho.
The catalogue accompanying the exhibition was written by Elizabeth Smart
, a friend of Deakin. Smart's catalogue included the observation: "You certainly won't feel rested after a time in John Deakin's Paris. These pictures take you by the scruff of the neck and insist that you see. If you have never been to Paris, you will find it haunted when you arrive." Reviewing the Paris photos in The Times
, Colin MacInnes
wrote: "Mr Deakin sees one side of Alice's looking glass and the infinite mysteries that lie behind it.
Deakin photographed many major figures in the Soho
art scene during the 1950s, including Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Frank Auerbach
and Eduardo Paolozzi
. Though the two had a difficult personal relationship, Bacon held Deakin's work in high regard. After Deakin's death, Bacon described him as "the best portrait photographer since Nadar
and Julia Margaret Cameron
." During the 1950s and 1960s, Deakin took a series of portraits on commission for Bacon, many of which the painter later used as source material for some of his most noted work, perhaps most notably the Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorn Standing in a Street in Soho, 1967. Deakin's photos of George Dyer, Muriel Belcher
and Henrietta Moraes
have also been associated with Bacon's paintings of these sitters.
Freud and Bacon appeared as two of the Eight Portraits, an unpublished manuscript of photos and writings which was discovered after Deakin's death. In this work, Deakin wrote of Bacon: "He's an odd one, wonderfully tender and generous by nature, yet with curious streaks of cruelty, especially to friends. I think that in this portrait I managed to catch something of the fear which must underlie these contradictions in his character."
In 1972, Deakin was with diagnosed with lung cancer
, and underwent an operation to have it removed. While recuperating, he died of a heart attack while staying in the Old Ship Hotel, Brighton
. In hospital, he had named Bacon as his next of kin
, forcing the painter to identify the body. "It was the last dirty trick he played on me", Bacon remarked.
wrote that, with Deakin's passing, "there was lost a photographer who often rivalled Bacon in his ability to make a likeness in which truth came wrapped and unpackaged. His portraits...had a dead-centred, unrhetorical quality. A complete human being was set before us, without additives." A series of exhibitions revived Deakin's reputation after the obscurity of his final years. In 1984, the Victoria & Albert Museum mounted the exhibition John Deakin: The Salvage of a Photographer. In 1996, the National Portrait Gallery, London, presented John Deakin Photographs. An exhibition, John Deakin: Tattoo Portraits was staged in Liverpool in 1999.
Daniel Farson
wrote of his portraits: "I am sure he will be seen as one of the most disturbing photographers of the century. The expressions of his victims look suitably appalled for Deakin had no time for such niceties as "cheese" and the effect was magnfied by huge contrasty blow-ups with every pore, blemish, and blood-shot eyeball exposed. In this way, he combined the instant horror of a passport photo with a shock value all his own." Robin Muir summed up his legacy: "His portraits still look starkly modern half a century on. His street photographs are haunting documents of three major cities. After two major retrospectives in London institutions, his place in the pantheon of twentieth century British photographers might be secure."
Deakin was the basis for the photographer Carl Castering in Colin Wilson's
novel Ritual In The Dark. Deakin was played by actor Karl Johnson
in John Maybury's
biographical film about Francis Bacon, Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon
.
Francis Bacon (painter)
Francis Bacon , was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his bold, austere, graphic and emotionally raw imagery. Bacon's painterly but abstract figures typically appear isolated in glass or steel geometrical cages set against flat, nondescript backgrounds...
Soho
Soho
Soho is an area of the City of Westminster and part of the West End of London. Long established as an entertainment district, for much of the 20th century Soho had a reputation for sex shops as well as night life and film industry. Since the early 1980s, the area has undergone considerable...
inner circle
The Colony Room
The Colony Room was a private members' drinking club for artists and other creative people in Dean Street, Soho, London. It gathered a reputation akin to famous clubs of the past such as the Kit-Cat Club. According to Anthony Haden-Guest, it is "one of the fiercely eccentric clubs that make all the...
. Deakin had wanted to be a painter, and doubting the validity and status of photography as an art form, he did not hold his photographic work in high esteem; many of his photographs have been lost, destroyed or damaged. Bacon based a number of famous paintings on photographs he commissioned by Deakin, including Henrietta Moraes on a Bed.
A chronic alcoholic, Deakin died in obscurity and poverty, but since the 1980s his reputation has grown through monographs, exhibitions and catalogues.
Early life and work for Vogue
Deakin was born in BebingtonBebington
Bebington is a small town and electoral ward within the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral, in Merseyside, England. It lies south of Liverpool and west southwest of Manchester, along the River Mersey on the eastern side of the Wirral Peninsula...
on the Wirral
Wirral Peninsula
Wirral or the Wirral is a peninsula in North West England. It is bounded by three bodies of water: to the west by the River Dee, forming a boundary with Wales, to the east by the River Mersey and to the north by the Irish Sea. Both terms "Wirral" and "the Wirral" are used locally , although the...
and attended West Kirby Grammar School. Though he had wanted to be a painter, he began to take photographs in Paris in 1939, when fashion illustrator Christian Bérard
Christian Bérard
Christian Bérard , also known as Bébé, was a French artist, fashion illustrator and designer.Bérard and his lover Boris Kochno, who directed the Ballets Russes and was also co-founder of the Ballet des Champs-Elysées, were one of the most prominent openly homosexual couples in French theater during...
introduced Deakin to Michel de Brunhoff, editor of French Vogue
Vogue (magazine)
Vogue is a fashion and lifestyle magazine that is published monthly in 18 national and one regional edition by Condé Nast.-History:In 1892 Arthur Turnure founded Vogue as a weekly publication in the United States. When he died in 1909, Condé Montrose Nast picked up the magazine and slowly began...
. From 1940 until 1945, Deakin served in the British Army Film Unit as a photographer, where he photographed the Second Battle of El Alamein
Second Battle of El Alamein
The Second Battle of El Alamein marked a major turning point in the Western Desert Campaign of the Second World War. The battle took place over 20 days from 23 October – 11 November 1942. The First Battle of El Alamein had stalled the Axis advance. Thereafter, Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery...
.
After the War, Deakin enjoyed two periods of employment as a staff photographer on the British edition of Vogue. The first period, from 1947 to 1948, ended in dismissal when he lost several valuable bits of photographic equipment. His second period from 1951 to 1954 also ended in dismissal, but during those three years Deakin was at his most active. He enjoyed the support of Vogue editor Audrey Withers, even though he disliked fashion photography. Deakin excelled at portraits of leading figures in literature, theatre and film. His subjects included Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...
, John Huston
John Huston
John Marcellus Huston was an American film director, screenwriter and actor. He wrote most of the 37 feature films he directed, many of which are today considered classics: The Maltese Falcon , The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , Key Largo , The Asphalt Jungle , The African Queen , Moulin Rouge...
, Luchino Visconti
Luchino Visconti
Luchino Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo was an Italian theatre, opera and cinema director, as well as a screenwriter. He is best known for his films The Leopard and Death in Venice .-Life:...
and many other artistic celebrities. Deakin recognised this work was his true vocation when he wrote:
Notorious for his "his blistering personality, bad behaviour and total disregard for others", Deakin was later fired from Vogue for a second time, "after turning-up with one too many hangovers". George Melly
George Melly
Alan George Heywood Melly was an English jazz and blues singer, critic, writer and lecturer. From 1965 to 1973 he was a film and television critic for The Observer and lectured on art history, with an emphasis on surrealism.-Early life and career:He was born in Liverpool and was educated at Stowe...
paid him a double-edged compliment when he wrote that Deakin was "a vicious little drunk of such inventive malice and implacable bitchiness that it’s surprising that he didn't choke on his own venom. And yet such was his wit, his vitality, his delighted relish in his own self-destruction that we find him irresistible."
Later life and relationship with Francis Bacon
Deakin spent long periods in Rome and in Paris during the 1950s, specialising in street photography. In 1951, John LehmannJohn Lehmann
Rudolf John Frederick Lehmann was an English poet and man of letters, and one of the foremost literary editors of the twentieth century, founding the periodicals New Writing and The London Magazine.The fourth child of journalist Rudolph Lehmann, and brother of Helen Lehmann, novelist Rosamond...
published a book of Deakin's Rome photographs, Rome Alive, with text by Christopher Kinmonth. Deakin spent many years trying unsuccessfully to publish a book of his Paris photographs, but they were exhibited in 1956 in David Archer's bookshop in Soho.
The catalogue accompanying the exhibition was written by Elizabeth Smart
Elizabeth Smart
Elizabeth Ann Smart is an American female activist and contributor for ABC News. She first gained widespread attention at age 14 when she was kidnapped from her home and recovered nine months later.-Early life:...
, a friend of Deakin. Smart's catalogue included the observation: "You certainly won't feel rested after a time in John Deakin's Paris. These pictures take you by the scruff of the neck and insist that you see. If you have never been to Paris, you will find it haunted when you arrive." Reviewing the Paris photos in The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
, Colin MacInnes
Colin MacInnes
Colin MacInnes was an English novelist and journalist.-Early life:MacInnes was born in London, the son of singer James Campbell McInnes and novelist Angela Thirkell, who was also related to Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin. His family moved to Australia in 1920, MacInness returning in 1930...
wrote: "Mr Deakin sees one side of Alice's looking glass and the infinite mysteries that lie behind it.
Deakin photographed many major figures in the Soho
Soho
Soho is an area of the City of Westminster and part of the West End of London. Long established as an entertainment district, for much of the 20th century Soho had a reputation for sex shops as well as night life and film industry. Since the early 1980s, the area has undergone considerable...
art scene during the 1950s, including Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Frank Auerbach
Frank Auerbach
Frank Helmut Auerbach is a painter born in Germany although he has been a naturalised British citizen since 1947.-Biography:Auerbach was born in Berlin, the son of Max Auerbach, a patent lawyer, and Charlotte Nora Burchardt, who had trained as an artist...
and Eduardo Paolozzi
Eduardo Paolozzi
Sir Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi, KBE, RA , was a Scottish sculptor and artist. He was a major figure in the international art sphere, while, working on his own interpretation and vision of the world. Paolozzi investigated how we can fit into the modern world to resemble our fragmented civilization...
. Though the two had a difficult personal relationship, Bacon held Deakin's work in high regard. After Deakin's death, Bacon described him as "the best portrait photographer since Nadar
Nadar (photographer)
Félix Nadar was the pseudonym of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon , a French photographer, caricaturist, journalist, novelist and balloonist. Some photographs by Nadar are marked "P. Nadar" for "Photographie Nadar" .-Life: born in April 1820 in Paris...
and Julia Margaret Cameron
Julia Margaret Cameron
Julia Margaret Cameron was a British photographer. She became known for her portraits of celebrities of the time, and for photographs with Arthurian and other legendary themes....
." During the 1950s and 1960s, Deakin took a series of portraits on commission for Bacon, many of which the painter later used as source material for some of his most noted work, perhaps most notably the Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorn Standing in a Street in Soho, 1967. Deakin's photos of George Dyer, Muriel Belcher
Muriel Belcher
Muriel Belcher was the founder and proprietress of a private drinking club known as the Colony Room at 41 Dean Street, Soho, London....
and Henrietta Moraes
Henrietta Moraes
Henrietta Moraes was a British artists' model, bohémienne, and memoirist. During the 1950s and '60s, she was the muse and inspiration for many artists of the Soho subculture, like Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, and known for her marriages and love affairs.A femme fatale and a bon vivant, she was...
have also been associated with Bacon's paintings of these sitters.
Freud and Bacon appeared as two of the Eight Portraits, an unpublished manuscript of photos and writings which was discovered after Deakin's death. In this work, Deakin wrote of Bacon: "He's an odd one, wonderfully tender and generous by nature, yet with curious streaks of cruelty, especially to friends. I think that in this portrait I managed to catch something of the fear which must underlie these contradictions in his character."
In 1972, Deakin was with diagnosed with lung cancer
Lung cancer
Lung cancer is a disease characterized by uncontrolled cell growth in tissues of the lung. If left untreated, this growth can spread beyond the lung in a process called metastasis into nearby tissue and, eventually, into other parts of the body. Most cancers that start in lung, known as primary...
, and underwent an operation to have it removed. While recuperating, he died of a heart attack while staying in the Old Ship Hotel, Brighton
Brighton
Brighton is the major part of the city of Brighton and Hove in East Sussex, England on the south coast of Great Britain...
. In hospital, he had named Bacon as his next of kin
Next of kin
Next of kin is a term with many interpretations depending on the jurisdiction being referred to. In some jurisdictions, such as the United States, it is used to describe a person's closest living blood relative or relatives...
, forcing the painter to identify the body. "It was the last dirty trick he played on me", Bacon remarked.
Critical opinion and Legacy
In 1979, the art critic John RussellJohn Russell (art critic)
John Russell CBE was a British American art critic.-Life and career:John Russell was born in Fleet, Hampshire, England, in 1919. He attended St Paul's School and then Magdalen College, Oxford....
wrote that, with Deakin's passing, "there was lost a photographer who often rivalled Bacon in his ability to make a likeness in which truth came wrapped and unpackaged. His portraits...had a dead-centred, unrhetorical quality. A complete human being was set before us, without additives." A series of exhibitions revived Deakin's reputation after the obscurity of his final years. In 1984, the Victoria & Albert Museum mounted the exhibition John Deakin: The Salvage of a Photographer. In 1996, the National Portrait Gallery, London, presented John Deakin Photographs. An exhibition, John Deakin: Tattoo Portraits was staged in Liverpool in 1999.
Daniel Farson
Daniel Farson
Daniel Negley Farson a British writer and broadcaster, was a popular television personality and prominent public figure in the late 1950s and early 1960s.-Early life:...
wrote of his portraits: "I am sure he will be seen as one of the most disturbing photographers of the century. The expressions of his victims look suitably appalled for Deakin had no time for such niceties as "cheese" and the effect was magnfied by huge contrasty blow-ups with every pore, blemish, and blood-shot eyeball exposed. In this way, he combined the instant horror of a passport photo with a shock value all his own." Robin Muir summed up his legacy: "His portraits still look starkly modern half a century on. His street photographs are haunting documents of three major cities. After two major retrospectives in London institutions, his place in the pantheon of twentieth century British photographers might be secure."
Deakin was the basis for the photographer Carl Castering in Colin Wilson's
Colin Wilson
Colin Henry Wilson is a prolific English writer who first came to prominence as a philosopher and novelist. Wilson has since written widely on true crime, mysticism and other topics. He prefers calling his philosophy new existentialism or phenomenological existentialism.- Early biography:Born and...
novel Ritual In The Dark. Deakin was played by actor Karl Johnson
Karl Johnson
Karl Johnson is a Welsh actor, notable for acting on stage, film and television. He is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from Birmingham City University. His most notable role to date was the title role in Derek Jarman's 1993 film Wittgenstein...
in John Maybury's
John Maybury
John Maybury is an English filmmaker. In 2005 he was listed as one of the 100 most influential gay and lesbian people in Britain.-Early life:...
biographical film about Francis Bacon, Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon
Love is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon
Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon is a 1998 film made for television by the British Broadcasting Corporation . It was written and directed by John Maybury and stars Derek Jacobi, Daniel Craig, and Tilda Swinton....
.
Further reading
- Peppiatt, Michael. Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996. ISBN 0-297-81616-0
- Farson, Daniel. Sacred Monsters. London: Bloomsbury, 1988. ISBN 0-7475-0254-4