Naomi Campbell’s party in the ’hood for her beau may have had a staggering 250 A-listers, but guess who wasn’t invited? Peripatetic photographer David Bailey with his wry sense of humour, who’d been backpacking — so to speak — through the Naga Hills, and was in Delhi for the processing of some of those films, spent considerable time cackling his way through conversations, but was less inclined to pick up his camera and go wandering the streets of the city — which he’d done previously, having completed, last year, a twin set of books on the city for Steidl, called Delhi Dilemma.
The books are tightly filled with close cropped images with a breathless quality to them — so, can he be accused of “exoticisation”? Bailey, hell, refutes the argument by rejecting the very premise of preparing, or biasing, or even anticipating what he might see and photograph. “I do the pictures for myself,” he says, eliminating the role of the market in his work — yet, he’s done more than 30 books, and his edition prints are part of the secondary market, the highest of which fetched Rs 1 crore. Mind you, that’s for an edition print (and he mostly works in editions of 20, though on occasion he’s done as few as three). For the record, Bailey makes the prints himself, and in a day, he says, he can prepare only, say, six or seven that may be signed by him.
These photographs are “expressions”, he says, and refers to the unfolding panorama of Delhi as just “one work”. He senses “a kind of madness” in India, a “surreal” quality where “nothing makes sense, then you come here and everything falls into place”. The Delhi books happened on account of his friendship with an “Indian mate” — a big collector of David Bailey editions — who took on the onus of sending him, first, to the capital, and lately, to remote Nagaland where he was struck by how women run the place. “They’re beautiful — not pretty, but beautiful.”
A leitmotif in his pictures is vernacular art, which he will pick up whether in India or Borneo or whichever part of the world he’s trained his camera on. A portraitist who became a celebrity as a celebrity photographer — think Vogue — Bailey will typically spend a fortnight in each place he works in. “I don’t plan and I leave it up to you to find the story,” he says. His, er, influences? “Disney and Picasso.” Disney? “The man was a genius, he made an industry out of a mouse…”
But it’s hasn’t always been about glamour in a career that began in 1960. Among his more extraordinary assignments was travelling to Sudan in 1986. “There was the smell of death, the smell of shit, and still you take pictures, because if you don’t tell their story, the world won’t give them money. That was my most emotional trip ever” — even though Afghanistan was no less traumatic. “How can you not help feeling sorry for 22-year-olds who come back without a leg?” Bailey does this by staying out of — beyond, if you will — politics. “I’ve photographed Chairman Mao, I’ve taken pictures of Fidel Castro, of gangsters, I don’t like them, but the story has to be told.”
It’s a more amusing story he shares now. He was in South Africa to photograph Naomi Campbell — who turned up three days late. To make it up to him, she invited him to breakfast with Nelson Mandela, so he ended up photographing the President, editions of which he later sold for around Rs 4 lakh each, one of which went on to make nearly twice the sum at Christie’s.
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He, really, should have been at Naomi’s party.
Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated