Part of the archive of John Deakin photographic prints, £11,000 at Chiswick Auctions.
His portraits included images of the likes of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Eduardo Paolozzi.
Indeed, some of Bacon’s major artworks were based on photographs he commissioned from Deakin, such as Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, Henrietta Moraes on a Bed and Three Studies of Lucian Freud.
Deakin originally wished to be a painter, but he went on to earn a living as a staff photographer on the British edition of Vogue during the 1940s-50s. He enjoyed the support of Vogue editor Audrey Withers, who championed him despite his dislike of fashion photography.
However, Deakin excelled at portraits and his subjects were the writers, artists, poets, actors and popular entertainers of the early post war years: among them, Eugene Ionesco, John Huston, WH Auden and Yves Montand, Picasso, and Dylan Thomas. Deakin recognised this work was his true vocation when he wrote:
"Being fatally drawn to the human race, what I want to do when I take a photograph is make a revelation about it. So my sitters turn into my victims …”
Notorious for "his blistering personality, bad behaviour and total disregard for others", Deakin was fired from Vogue in 1954, on account of his drinking and "an accumulation of minor incidents involving lateness, a series of crashing tripods, and inevitable arguments with fashion editors”.
Archive emerges
Appearing at Chiswick Auctions’ 19th & 20th Century Photographs sale on June 6, was a box containing Deakin’s photographic work prints from the 1950s-60s. It had been compiled by BL Kearley, an agency that worked with him.
Comprising 30 silver gelatin prints of varying sizes, it included portraits of four well-known personalities: Kenneth Tynan (1952), Siobhán McKenna (1952), Orson Welles (1951) and Picasso, plus other subject matter, which included a scene in the French House, Soho, showing proprietor Gaston Berlemont behind the bar, and contact sheets featuring dance hall and street scenes in Paris, nuns in Rome and unidentified portraits, many of which had Deakin’s annotations in pencil verso.
A chronic alcoholic, Deakin died in obscurity and poverty but posthumously his reputation has grown immensely.
Exhibitions to date include the Victoria and Albert Museum John Deakin: The Salvage of a Photographer (1984-85), the National Portrait Gallery John Deakin Photographs (1996), and The Photographers Gallery, London in Under the Influence: John Deakin and the Lure of Soho (2014).
The lot had a modest estimate of £500-700, but sold to an online bidder for £11,000, illustrating the allure of Deakin as a photographer and his reputational rise.
