Author Description

For more than fifty years, Norman Parkinson was one of Britain's leading exponents of fashion and portrait photography, as well as one of very few British photographers whose reputation carried throughout Europe and across the Atlantic. This retrospective of his work, edited and with a text written by Martin Harrison and published with the full cooperation of Norman Parkinson's estate, is the first serious attempt to reappraise his contribution to twentieth-century culture. Parkinson's career was varied: beginning in the Modernist movement of the 1930s, he broke new ground in fashion photography with his images of spontaneous movement for Harper's Bazaar. In 1939, he moved to British Vogue and documented the war years from his farm in the English countryside. His first stay in New York in 1949 signalled the beginning of his international travels and an increasingly cosmopolitan style of photography in the 1950s. When the mood changed in the early 1960s Parkinson was approaching fifty years of age and his exuberant and highly individual response to the London scene for Queen presents a markedly different view from that of Bailey, Avedon or Newton. He continued to work for Vogue until 1976, when a move to Town & Country in New York heralded a renaissance of his career. That, and his acclaimed portraits of well-known figures, including the Royal Family, further boosted his international reputation.