An interview with David Bailey

He’s known Essex since his youth, because Bailey, famously, is an East-Ender, born to a working-class family in North Leyton, then moving to East Ham when he was three. He used to go on day trips to Southend with his folks, he says; “Awful. They were all pissed on the coach, and they used to stop at three or four pubs on the way back. I remember the beer bottles rolling up and down the coach.”

Growing up in the 1940s and 50s, he also remembers the Blitz and its after-effects, and says he knows “all about buildings being there one day and then not being there”. It was tough, and a creative career looked unlikely – until he got into William Claxton, by way of his jazz album covers.

“I got into photography because of [jazz musician] Chet Baker and Claxton’s pictures of him,” he says. “The pictures were always grainy, and Chet Baker always looked great. At 14, 15, 16, I didn’t have to go to art school. We didn’t know such a thing existed, and even if we did we would not have got in anyway.”

Leaving school at 15, he worked numerous jobs before being called up for National Service in 1956; posted in Singapore he got hold of a second hand 35mm Canon, then when he was back in the UK, tried to get into the London College of Printing. Knocked back because of his school record, he secured a job assisting the portrait and fashion photographer John French. The rest, as they say, is history.

Cut to the late 1970s and Bailey was well-established, but heading onto the streets very early (“or very late”) to shoot buildings, making the series that became NW1. When I ask why he did it he won’t be drawn, saying there was “something there needed photographing, that’s all”. The press release says he’d lived in the area for nearly 30 years and noticed it changing; he says he sought out back streets, and that you’d “have to have been an idiot” not to have noticed the district’s evolution.

“I didn’t care – I like continuous change, like the Buddhists,” he says. “I don’t want things to be the same all the time.

“I’m not preaching to anybody or saying ‘This is going to disappear’,” he continues. “If it disappears, it disappears. I’m doing it because there’s something of interest in the building. Buildings are like people – there’s always a story if you can look for it, there’s nobody boring.”

442. Manley Street, 1982, from the book NW1 © David Bailey
442. Manley Street, 1982, from the book NW1 © David Bailey

He concedes that he captured a moment, though, and says that, for him, that’s the beauty of photography. “It’s the most interesting art form, when it’s used properly, because it’s of the moment – and the moment is all we’ve got,” he expands.

He worked on NW1 between other work for four years, driving around to find locations, then returning to shoot with good light. “I’d come back at 4pm for the light,” he says. “I always had a compass with me – actually I always know where north and south is – and I’d go back two or three times. It’s all 5×4 and 10×8, and all shot without assistants. I never have too many assistants, they just get in the way.”

Inspired by Eugène Atget’s images of vanishing Paris, he mostly took shots with no people; if people were about, he made sure they would be blurred. People would just distract the viewer, he says, and he wanted to focus the attention; it’s the same reason he likes to use white backgrounds, he says, if he’s shooting a studio portrait.

“But I don’t care what I get across, whatever people want to read into them,” he adds. “If they like them, they like them, if they don’t they don’t.”

Diane Smyth

Diane Smyth is the editor of BJP, returning for a second stint on staff in 2023 - after 15 years on the team until 2019. As a freelancer, she has written for The Guardian, FT Weekend Magazine, Creative Review, Aperture, FOAM, Aesthetica and Apollo. She has also curated exhibitions for institutions such as The Photographers Gallery and Lianzhou Foto Festival. You can follow her on instagram @dismy