Terence Donovan (1936-1996) came to prominence in London in the 1960s as part of a post-war renaissance in art, fashion, graphic design and photography. The energy of his fashion photographs and portraits, and the force of his personality, have assumed in the intervening years an almost folkloric significance.
With David Bailey and Brian Duffy, photographers of a similar background and outlook, Donovan was perceived as a new force in British fashion photography. The three comprised a Black Trinity’, according to Norman Parkinson, who found their methodology crude and their pictures at best unpolished’. Donovan was 23 when he opened his studio, Bailey the same age when his first substantial commission came from Vogue. Their early success heralded the era of the specialised hero’, which Vogue and Queen magazines would reinforce and mythologize in print. Donovan’s accredited appearance in a star-studded Bailey fashion shoot, for Vogue in 1961, was an early signifier that photographers were now the equal to television stars, comedians and theatre actors. Later, on screen, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow up (1966) would strengthen the notion of photographer-as-cultural-icon.
alloflondonismyplayground# 