THE ICONIC PHOTOGRAPHERS FIRST RETROSPECTIVE IN SPAIN

David Bailey's Changing Fashion is a landmark exhibition celebrating the transformational impact of Bailey’s photography in the 1960s and 1970s.

Exchanging the mannered studio environment for the gritty reality of the streets, Bailey took the fashion world by storm. His work with his first great muse Jean Shrimpton set the revolutionary tone of the decade to come. Bailey is a master of musical portraiture. An enthusiastic trumpet player in his youth Bailey has an instinctive understanding what makes musicians tick. His earliest images of the Beatles and the Stones catch precisely the differences between the bands. In Martin Harrison’s words, “The Stones loose and cavalier, Beatles buttoned up and controlled”. His early work with both bands set the foundation for the British invasion of New York.

Bailey became not only the preeminent photographer at Vogue but a celebrity in his own right. His celebrated box of pin-ups (1965) which forms the centrepiece of the exhibition is an essay on the transitory nature of fame. Bailey pictured each of his 36 sitters head and shoulders tightly cropped, against a harshly lit white background. Box of pin-ups is Bailey’s statement contribution to 1960s photography.

As the sixties drew to a close Bailey had been the leading Vogue photographer for a decade. His refusal to be limited to a single style or format turned out to be his great strength. There’s a freedom and informality about his 70s portraits. Marie Helvin was the catalyst for an important change in Bailey’s photography. ‘Marie changed my style of taking pictures… I began experimenting with nudes, with the body.’

The exhibition is a compelling portrait of an artist who defined the visual language of the 1960s and 1970s and has continuously reinvented himself through experimentation and technical innovation—a photographer who, in Damien Hirst's words, "defined the world around him for the last fifty years."