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| A fashion shot for Vogue, Florence, 1964 |
In 1979, after two decades of work as one of the country’s top photographers, he broke down. The trigger was a small one: an assistant told him they’d run out of toilet paper. “I realised I was chairman, CEO and senior stockholder in my business and I was now responsible for toilet paper,” he says. He gathered his boxes of negatives, took them to the garden and set them alight. Great plumes of black smoke rose into the sky over north London. He didn’t take another photograph for 30 years.
In fact, Duffy had all but disappeared off the cultural radar – until now. Next week, the first exhibition of his work will open in London. And in November, a BBC documentary will go some way to returning Duffy to his rightful place in the history of British photography.
Duffy was always the intellectual, mysterious member of the “Black Trinity”. His hard edge, he says now, had its roots in an anarchic, destructive wartime childhood; running wild as a 10-year-old, he’d break into houses and smash mirrors. “We’d turn up on a bombsite where people were still going through the rubble worried about their things and we’d just plunder it.”
Captured, as he puts it, by the London County Council in 1945, he was sent to a special school for disruptive children. There they were taught to read and dosed with culture by a particularly motley crew of teachers, all of whom had lost eyes, hands and legs in the first world war. “We all became super fanatics on opera and ballet and that’s what turned me on to art. The first time I saw Mozart’s Papagano from The Magic Flute jumping around like a halfwit in that bird suit it blew me away.”
Duffy went on to study painting at St Martins but switched to dress design, in part “because there were a lot of good-looking girls doing it”.
In 1954, he was offered a job at Balenciaga in Paris – but opted instead for a more lucrative gig as fashion illustrator for the magazine Harper’s Bazaar. One day, he picked up a contact sheet in the art editor’s office and thought, “That’s right up my street. Women, frocks … ”
He got his first photography commission – to shoot two dresses at the Royal Opera House – from The Sunday Times. He fluffed it and had to reshoot, but the job earned him £10 and bolstered his confidence. “In 1957, I went to Vogue. The arrogance! I don’t know how I had the nerve. I showed the art director a bunch of off-the-wall snaps I had, including one of a glass eye with a snail on it.”
And that was it. He worked as in-house photographer for the magazine until 1963, helping to shape an aesthetic that defined the decade.
How does he account for the new approach to photography that he, Bailey and Donovan spearheaded? “I think we all had an inferiority complex and a chip on our shoulders,” Duffy says. “We had a certain abrasiveness. Prior to that, it was all ‘Darling, I love it!’”
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| Michael Caine, 1964 |
Now frail in body if not mind, the 76-year-old Duffy is suffering from a degenerative lung disease. The driving force behind the London exhibition has been his son Chris, who discovered some negatives that survived the bonfire of 1979 and has spent the past three years assembling an archive of his father’s work.
The process has afforded Duffy the opportunity for some self-reappraisal. “I look back at my photographs and see them in a new way,” he says.
Although he defines a good photograph as one that is in focus and correctly exposed, he also admits there’s a certain alchemy in his images that comes from more than technical proficiency. “They’re mysterious,” he says. “Artists know fuck-all about what they’re doing. It’d be fascinating to talk to Picasso or Mozart, but they don’t know what they’re doing. The work has the message in it.”
‘Duffy’ is at the Chris Beetles Gallery, London SW1, from October 14 to November 7
