David Bailey: Chasing Rainbows

The name of David Bailey is synonymous with photographs of beautiful people. In this latest celebration of his art, he brings together for the first time the best of all these photographs from the 1960s up to the present day.

Through his long and extraordinarily successful career, he has focused on the faces that represents the apex of beauty for a particular time. Like the rainbow, this beauty comes and goes – yet Bailey has spent a lifetime chasing these rainbows and has succeeded in capturing the iconic faces of each era.

Commissioned by the finest fashion magazines of the time, most notably Italian and French Vogue, these portraits include models such as Jean Shrimpton, Marie Helvin, Jerry Hall, Penelope Tree, and Bailey’s wife, Catherine Dyer. But Bailey’s idea of beauty does not end with fashionable women. It encompasses such pillars of contemporary culture as Yves St Laurent, Helmut Newton and Manolo Blahnik, as well as startling ethnographic portraits, and Bailey’s strangely haunting paintings – published here in book form for the first time – reveal at their heart an abstract kind of beauty.

Robin Muir’s text charts Bailey’s meteoric career from his first days at Vogue up to today and reminds us of the ways in which Britain’s greatest living photographer has challenged our notions of female beauty with his own highly personal vision.

No admirer of either beauty or Bailey will want to be without this book.