Goodbye Guv'nor
Terence Donovan 1936-1996
INTERVIEW BY MARTYN MOORE
WHEN Terence Donovan met me for lunch, a few weeks before he died, he was as happy and ebullient as ever. The great fashion photographer chose my food for me, ordered me more beer than I needed and took our interview along his preferred route. There was the occasional detour – ramble even – but they were the thoughts and words of a man still obsessed with creating pictures after more than 30 years of doing it.
Terence Donovan was never ordinary and no conversation with him ever could be. He told me he didn't like the way articles portrayed him as a chirpy Cockney, and then he talked like one for two hours. He asked me not to print his swearing, and then turned the air blue. He told me I have lovely teeth. Three times.
Enough has been written about the big guy, the Guv'nor, since he died in November 1996. This was his last interview and so the rest of the words are his:
"I'm interested in illustrating the upbeat things of life, I'm not riveted by the downbeat. I know a lot about the downbeat but it doesn't intrigue me to record it.
"I like the glisten. I know it's irrelevant but it's hopeful, quite harmless, quite cheerful.
"It's a nice time in my life, actually. I'm enjoying it and I'll tell you why: I'm not grinding away like I used to. I don't want to do that. There's a thing in the film industry called Tamar Productions - Take the Money And Run. You think, I'll do that because that'll pay the rent, but then it sticks to you like napalm. I'm quite careful what I get involved with. As a young man, in my diary you'd see four assignments a day. As I got older I learned that in order to do something well, you've got to really want to do it.
"Advertising is getting lazy. You see it, man, all this endless regeneration of old material, '60s music and old American cars going off into the desert. That's not the answer. I'm not saying you should cold-bloodedly set out to be original, and I'm not saying you don't absorb things osmotically, in the aesthetic sense. What I am saying is that you must engage your own brain and I don't think people do it enough.
"There's a lot of difference between an advertising photographer and a photographer. When I used to work for Elle magazine in France, the art director never told me what to do. You had to work it out for yourself. In Paris and there was Helmut Newton in one studio and Guy Bourdin in the other. They're photographers, man. They weren't nicking anything off of anybody. I watched Guy Bourdin and there's no more way I could take a photograph like Guy than fly.
"When I did my 900th interview about that Robert Palmer video Addicted to Love someone asked me where I got the idea from and I said, 'I did something rather odd... I thought of it!' It seems to be a rather old fashioned thing to do.
"I was speaking to The Association of Photographers and I told them to be careful with these digital images because they have a deadness to them. I was looking at an advertisement for a plate of salmon and I realised that there was about nine images joined up there. Well, I remember taking a picture of a plate of salmon for Aer Lingus on a lake in Connimara in the '60s and we just photographed it. And mine was actually a better shot because the background was slightly out of focus. They'd got everything razor sharp and a non-photographer can sense when something's wrong.
"Serious musicians like to hear their music played on LP as opposed to CD. Whoever's in charge of the show upstairs, he's got a wicked sense of humour because as they give it to you, the progress and new ideas, they take something away. You know what I mean?
"You can't stop technology, you don't want to stop technology. But if you get one of these advanced modern cameras and you're photographing a girl in a black suit against a black background you'd better switch everything off and get out the meter and take a reading. If you don't do that, old love, you're snookered because most of those guys that design cameras, one thing they never do is use them.
"I saw the prototype of an East German camera at Photokina years ago and I said, Have you tried to use this? Just wind ten films through it and you'll find your fingers bleeding. They changed the design.
"Amateur photographers have got a problem because they've got no reason to take a picture. They're kind of equipment junkies. When you look at a picture that Cartier-Bresson took on a 50mm...
"When I first started, I thought that if I took enough frames, I'd get a good picture. Photographs are taken with the brain, the camera records it, but it's a meta-physical process because what happens in an image is beyond what you see. And the problem with amateurs is that they're too busy with the technical side. It's the head that makes pictures and the cameras record the thought. You've got to be able to read the images.
"You have to make it look easy when you're photographing people; have a dialogue going. You can't hide behind your camera. When I was 15 I was shy, so I used to make myself go up to people to photograph them. I'd do anything that frightened me. And now I say to young photographers, 'Don't try and sneak pictures on a 100mm lens, get a 35 on and walk up to them.'
"I was taught by hard men, really tough. I was a blockmaker, making printing plates and it taught me the fundamentals of exposure. On any film shoot, in any situation, within reason, I'm never more than a stop out. I can look at anybody's face and say, 1/30 at 2.8. And if I am out, it will be a stop over, which is always the right way to be. And that was all from that training.
"I used to get up at eight o'clock, work in the studio from nine until seven at night, go out and have a bite, come back at nine, develop all the negatives of the day, contact them and go home at 1.30. That's how you learn how to do the job. You know what they say in the SAS, 'Train hard, fight easy'.
"Our society has become soft. You've got to get weaving and not expect society to look after you. I loathed going into the British army but I'm glad I did. There's never been a situation in my life that even got remotely near cracking me. When you've painted half a ton of coal white with a toothbrush and then painted it back black again, you're not too fussed about much.
"Photography is a militaristic operation, you've got to be organised. Most people aren't organised.
"What you've got to understand about Bailey and me is, we were fantastically hard working. Bailey and I never wanted to be successful photographers. That wasn't the plot. We weren't ambitious, ever. We just wanted to do it.
"My first darkroom was a cupboard and I couldn't afford a red light so I used to have a bit of cloth handy and the cloth used to catch fire. But by God I wanted to do it.
"You've got to try hard not to develop the vague notion you might be of some consequence. 'Cos if you manage that, you're free from the tyranny of it. You see that a million times, people that really think they've cracked it and then it comes slamming out of the woodwork at them. Judo teaches you that, some skinny little bloke you think, Oh, he's nothing, and the next thing you're lying on your back. It's much more to do with the philosophy of life than anything to do with photography.
"I've been very interested in religion all my life. I've mixed with the richest people on this planet and I know that real money brings no happiness at all if you're not buzzing.
"Don't do it if you want to be famous. As long as people leave college and they don't want to buy a car out of photography, or don't want to get a flat in Mayfair, if they just want to be photographers... If they have passion and if they have got something to say, they'll make it.
"When you're young, you go on assignment, somebody steams into your pictures and it tears your guts out, you know. And you defend them. I don't defend my work, never again. I hope you like it, I've tried hard. I've tried my best but if you don't like it...
"I've tried to keep my eyes and ears open in my life, be a bit receptive. That's why I go and photograph where all those kids are dancing. It's interesting. Too many people of my age are too locked off. You can look old, but you don't have to be old. Parkinson was 73 but he was not an old man, he was a wild man, sparky.
"Salgado, Irving Penn, Mapplethorpe was a wonderful photographer but probably he was a spectacular marketing job, aided hugely by death, Helmut Newton hasn't lost it.
"It's always been a tough job, Cecil Beaton was a tough old boy, Parkinson was a tough old boy, Eve Arnold's a tough woman. Not a job for somebody light on bottle, I'll tell you, photography. Not when you think of what can go wrong.
"I have the advantage of having a bit of mileage on the clock. You know at the end of the show it comes out fairly alright, otherwise you'd go crackers. If I slashed at my wrists with a razor blade at every image I've had ruined or nicked...
"We're not going to be around for ever and I don't know who will take over from us. I'm sure, as we speak, there is some bloke enrolling at some college in the north-east of England who's going to. Because we'll all go, we'll all be on the great stage in the sky at some point."
Art "Photography, for me, isn't art. It's specific. You can have things in photographs that are emotive, a crying child by a car crash or something, but that's not the photograph, that's the content that's emotive.
"Because I paint and take photographs, I think photography is a craft because it doesn't attack you. That's why I don't have many exhibitions. I think exhibitions are quite dull, personally. I don't know why. I like photographs. I like looking at them but how many times have you come out of an exhibition and gone Phew!?
"When old Avedon had that exhibition of stuff, you know, 15 foot high prints, well it was just graphics to me, and the weakness of graphics is it's studied. Whereas if you look at a painting by Lucien Freud, skilled as it is, there's a bit of mad vibrancy about it all. Or Bacon, insanity on the paper, but I love it because I don't know where it came from and it mystifies me."
Commitment "I gave a lecture at a camera club not too long ago and when I'm speaking somewhere at seven o'clock I turn up at six and then disappear. Then I come back at two minutes to seven to start. The place was filled with amateur photographers and I'd never seen a group so enthusiastic. Well, it turned out they'd seen me walk past the hall at six and thought I'd had a look at the place and thought, 'I'm not speaking there' and done a runner. No wonder they were pleased.
"Then few weeks later I was at the Royal College of Art and after I'd studied their work in the morning we had some lunch and then sat down to talk. And then a girl got up and I said, 'Where are you going?' And she said, 'To get coffee.' So I said, 'You've just had lunch.' And then the German next to me said, 'Zis isn't ze military now you know.' And so I said, 'And you can f*ck off as well!'
"But do you see what that illustrates?"
INTERVIEW BY MARTYN MOORE
WHEN Terence Donovan met me for lunch, a few weeks before he died, he was as happy and ebullient as ever. The great fashion photographer chose my food for me, ordered me more beer than I needed and took our interview along his preferred route. There was the occasional detour – ramble even – but they were the thoughts and words of a man still obsessed with creating pictures after more than 30 years of doing it.
Terence Donovan was never ordinary and no conversation with him ever could be. He told me he didn't like the way articles portrayed him as a chirpy Cockney, and then he talked like one for two hours. He asked me not to print his swearing, and then turned the air blue. He told me I have lovely teeth. Three times.
Enough has been written about the big guy, the Guv'nor, since he died in November 1996. This was his last interview and so the rest of the words are his:
"I'm interested in illustrating the upbeat things of life, I'm not riveted by the downbeat. I know a lot about the downbeat but it doesn't intrigue me to record it.
"I like the glisten. I know it's irrelevant but it's hopeful, quite harmless, quite cheerful.
"It's a nice time in my life, actually. I'm enjoying it and I'll tell you why: I'm not grinding away like I used to. I don't want to do that. There's a thing in the film industry called Tamar Productions - Take the Money And Run. You think, I'll do that because that'll pay the rent, but then it sticks to you like napalm. I'm quite careful what I get involved with. As a young man, in my diary you'd see four assignments a day. As I got older I learned that in order to do something well, you've got to really want to do it.
"Advertising is getting lazy. You see it, man, all this endless regeneration of old material, '60s music and old American cars going off into the desert. That's not the answer. I'm not saying you should cold-bloodedly set out to be original, and I'm not saying you don't absorb things osmotically, in the aesthetic sense. What I am saying is that you must engage your own brain and I don't think people do it enough.
"There's a lot of difference between an advertising photographer and a photographer. When I used to work for Elle magazine in France, the art director never told me what to do. You had to work it out for yourself. In Paris and there was Helmut Newton in one studio and Guy Bourdin in the other. They're photographers, man. They weren't nicking anything off of anybody. I watched Guy Bourdin and there's no more way I could take a photograph like Guy than fly.
"When I did my 900th interview about that Robert Palmer video Addicted to Love someone asked me where I got the idea from and I said, 'I did something rather odd... I thought of it!' It seems to be a rather old fashioned thing to do.
"I was speaking to The Association of Photographers and I told them to be careful with these digital images because they have a deadness to them. I was looking at an advertisement for a plate of salmon and I realised that there was about nine images joined up there. Well, I remember taking a picture of a plate of salmon for Aer Lingus on a lake in Connimara in the '60s and we just photographed it. And mine was actually a better shot because the background was slightly out of focus. They'd got everything razor sharp and a non-photographer can sense when something's wrong.
"Serious musicians like to hear their music played on LP as opposed to CD. Whoever's in charge of the show upstairs, he's got a wicked sense of humour because as they give it to you, the progress and new ideas, they take something away. You know what I mean?
"You can't stop technology, you don't want to stop technology. But if you get one of these advanced modern cameras and you're photographing a girl in a black suit against a black background you'd better switch everything off and get out the meter and take a reading. If you don't do that, old love, you're snookered because most of those guys that design cameras, one thing they never do is use them.
"I saw the prototype of an East German camera at Photokina years ago and I said, Have you tried to use this? Just wind ten films through it and you'll find your fingers bleeding. They changed the design.
"Amateur photographers have got a problem because they've got no reason to take a picture. They're kind of equipment junkies. When you look at a picture that Cartier-Bresson took on a 50mm...
"When I first started, I thought that if I took enough frames, I'd get a good picture. Photographs are taken with the brain, the camera records it, but it's a meta-physical process because what happens in an image is beyond what you see. And the problem with amateurs is that they're too busy with the technical side. It's the head that makes pictures and the cameras record the thought. You've got to be able to read the images.
"You have to make it look easy when you're photographing people; have a dialogue going. You can't hide behind your camera. When I was 15 I was shy, so I used to make myself go up to people to photograph them. I'd do anything that frightened me. And now I say to young photographers, 'Don't try and sneak pictures on a 100mm lens, get a 35 on and walk up to them.'
"I was taught by hard men, really tough. I was a blockmaker, making printing plates and it taught me the fundamentals of exposure. On any film shoot, in any situation, within reason, I'm never more than a stop out. I can look at anybody's face and say, 1/30 at 2.8. And if I am out, it will be a stop over, which is always the right way to be. And that was all from that training.
"I used to get up at eight o'clock, work in the studio from nine until seven at night, go out and have a bite, come back at nine, develop all the negatives of the day, contact them and go home at 1.30. That's how you learn how to do the job. You know what they say in the SAS, 'Train hard, fight easy'.
"Our society has become soft. You've got to get weaving and not expect society to look after you. I loathed going into the British army but I'm glad I did. There's never been a situation in my life that even got remotely near cracking me. When you've painted half a ton of coal white with a toothbrush and then painted it back black again, you're not too fussed about much.
"Photography is a militaristic operation, you've got to be organised. Most people aren't organised.
"What you've got to understand about Bailey and me is, we were fantastically hard working. Bailey and I never wanted to be successful photographers. That wasn't the plot. We weren't ambitious, ever. We just wanted to do it.
"My first darkroom was a cupboard and I couldn't afford a red light so I used to have a bit of cloth handy and the cloth used to catch fire. But by God I wanted to do it.
"You've got to try hard not to develop the vague notion you might be of some consequence. 'Cos if you manage that, you're free from the tyranny of it. You see that a million times, people that really think they've cracked it and then it comes slamming out of the woodwork at them. Judo teaches you that, some skinny little bloke you think, Oh, he's nothing, and the next thing you're lying on your back. It's much more to do with the philosophy of life than anything to do with photography.
"I've been very interested in religion all my life. I've mixed with the richest people on this planet and I know that real money brings no happiness at all if you're not buzzing.
"Don't do it if you want to be famous. As long as people leave college and they don't want to buy a car out of photography, or don't want to get a flat in Mayfair, if they just want to be photographers... If they have passion and if they have got something to say, they'll make it.
"When you're young, you go on assignment, somebody steams into your pictures and it tears your guts out, you know. And you defend them. I don't defend my work, never again. I hope you like it, I've tried hard. I've tried my best but if you don't like it...
"I've tried to keep my eyes and ears open in my life, be a bit receptive. That's why I go and photograph where all those kids are dancing. It's interesting. Too many people of my age are too locked off. You can look old, but you don't have to be old. Parkinson was 73 but he was not an old man, he was a wild man, sparky.
"Salgado, Irving Penn, Mapplethorpe was a wonderful photographer but probably he was a spectacular marketing job, aided hugely by death, Helmut Newton hasn't lost it.
"It's always been a tough job, Cecil Beaton was a tough old boy, Parkinson was a tough old boy, Eve Arnold's a tough woman. Not a job for somebody light on bottle, I'll tell you, photography. Not when you think of what can go wrong.
"I have the advantage of having a bit of mileage on the clock. You know at the end of the show it comes out fairly alright, otherwise you'd go crackers. If I slashed at my wrists with a razor blade at every image I've had ruined or nicked...
"We're not going to be around for ever and I don't know who will take over from us. I'm sure, as we speak, there is some bloke enrolling at some college in the north-east of England who's going to. Because we'll all go, we'll all be on the great stage in the sky at some point."
Art "Photography, for me, isn't art. It's specific. You can have things in photographs that are emotive, a crying child by a car crash or something, but that's not the photograph, that's the content that's emotive.
"Because I paint and take photographs, I think photography is a craft because it doesn't attack you. That's why I don't have many exhibitions. I think exhibitions are quite dull, personally. I don't know why. I like photographs. I like looking at them but how many times have you come out of an exhibition and gone Phew!?
"When old Avedon had that exhibition of stuff, you know, 15 foot high prints, well it was just graphics to me, and the weakness of graphics is it's studied. Whereas if you look at a painting by Lucien Freud, skilled as it is, there's a bit of mad vibrancy about it all. Or Bacon, insanity on the paper, but I love it because I don't know where it came from and it mystifies me."
Commitment "I gave a lecture at a camera club not too long ago and when I'm speaking somewhere at seven o'clock I turn up at six and then disappear. Then I come back at two minutes to seven to start. The place was filled with amateur photographers and I'd never seen a group so enthusiastic. Well, it turned out they'd seen me walk past the hall at six and thought I'd had a look at the place and thought, 'I'm not speaking there' and done a runner. No wonder they were pleased.
"Then few weeks later I was at the Royal College of Art and after I'd studied their work in the morning we had some lunch and then sat down to talk. And then a girl got up and I said, 'Where are you going?' And she said, 'To get coffee.' So I said, 'You've just had lunch.' And then the German next to me said, 'Zis isn't ze military now you know.' And so I said, 'And you can f*ck off as well!'
"But do you see what that illustrates?"
