In Vogue: The Photography of David Bailey and Lee Miller.

Richard Calvocoressi: Lee Miller I Begegnungen, Nicolai Verlag, ISBN:3-87584-472-6, also in English as Lee Miller: Portraits from a Life, Thames and Hudson, London.

David Bailey (with Gerard Saint/Bif Active): David Bailey, Steidl Verlag, ISBN: 3-88243-755-3, as published in English by Thames and Hudson, London.

David Bailey and Lee Miller both worked on a regular basis for Vogue magazine, Bailey as a classic fashion photographer, Miller as a photojournalist and portrait photographer. From different generations, their background could not be more different. Miller is best known as an 'American in Paris' , working with Man Ray, becoming a pioneer of solarisation and an avant-garde figure in her own right. Bailey emerged half a century later as the quintissential London Lad, who built an impressive career in the nineteen sixties, when the English capital emerged from the long years of post-war gloom and began to 'swing'. However, they both worked before the age of digital photography, during an era when making photographs meant using a camera and sheet or roll film on the street, or in the studio, with the subsequent darkroom work of development and printing.

What these two books have to say about their respective subjects is an interesting contrast in the technique of writing about photographers. The Bailey book is clearly an effort to provide a structure to his work , with a text by Robin Muir that uses the language of art criticism, oevre, artist, influences, about a photographer, who has always been more influential than influenced, more a highly original commercial talent, than contemporary artist . From thousands of photographs, the selection of about 200 images has many familiar examples of Bailey's fashion photography including the models with whom he is associated, Penelope Tree and Jean Shrimpton from the sixties onward, Marie Helvin and Catherine Bailey from the seventies and eighties. Bailey himself had a hand in making the selection which is grouped in four thematic sections, glamour, etc, rather than a chronological selection. While there is no reason to gripe about a nicely presented coffee table book, the commercial character of Bailey's work means it is extremely interesting to see the pictures in their original context , especially as milestones in the use of colour photography for magazines. It would have been interesting to see an appraisal of Bailey's work from the graphic designers and art directors who put hispicytures on the page. A more scholarly approach to the kind of information it is worth including in a representative account of a photographer's work might have been rewarding. Calvocoressi's approach to Miller might have been more successful if it had been applied to Bailey and Miller probably deserves a large scale portfolio type presentation of her works in the format used for Bailey.

Interest in Miller has tended to stem from her association with the avant-garde, first in Paris, then in England, where she married the modernist Roland Penrose, a surrealist and founder of the ICA. The biographical notes from Calvocoressi are clear and informative, but the selection of photos also includes a large number of straighforward personal 'snaps' that are interesting mainly for the well-known faces, Eluard, Ray etc.. Miller worked almost exclusively in black and white, however, in contrast to Bailey, her work shifts from the exploration of photography as a way of creating images through the twin genres of fashion work and high quality magazine photojournalism during world war two. Even during the journalistic phase, her personality creeps into the photographs, a mischievous self portrait in Hitler's bathroom, posing by an aircraft en route for war. This sense of a photographer who has had to adapt to different editor's requirements, is a common enough experience for photographers, who are first and foremost seen as people who can be relied on to handle a camera, whether in a studio, or in the field.

The advent of computer based imaging systems, both with digital cameras and the editing systems like photoshop, has transformed the way photographs are conceived, created and manipulated since these two phtotographers were at the peak of their careers. On the evdience of these two books, the art historians have still to come to terms with the kind of creative careers photographers pursue. It is an illusion to remove commercial photographs from the context of their creation, to build a myth of art, equally, the biography of a photographer must come to grips with the photographs as more than images from a life. The only thing these books have in common, is their failure to account for the aesthetic impact of the hundreds of pictures they display, their distinctive technical qualities and the reasons why those images are interesting.

jc