David Bailey: Four Beats to the Bar and No Cheating

This programme contains very strong language.

In the early '60s, when you shot for Vogue magazine,

they never put the photographer's name.

They only put your surname, they only put Bailey or Beaton or Avedon.

If somebody said David, I wouldn't turn around.

Kind of nice name, Bailey.

Maybe I should change my name to Bailey Bailey.

Catherine was funny about Bailey. Deneuve.

She always said, "Why are you called Belly?"

She said, "I thought a belly was a belly."

By revolutionising the image of women

almost overnight in the early '60s, Bailey became a legend.

His own image as bad boy and womaniser

meant Bailey was anything but a docile servant of the system.

What do you say to people when you photograph them?

I coo like a bloody dove.

I think you just sit there.

For over half a century, Bailey has travelled the world,

often in the company of the most beautiful women.

Alternately photographer, filmmaker, publisher, painter or sculptor.

Yeah, be nothing. Do nothing.

You look beautiful.

OK. Just lay back.

Yeah. You can put an arm up if you like. Don't worry about the clothes.

Yeah, just... That's perfect. Look how beautiful you look.

That's it, that's all I want.

Always eager to experiment,

as if to escape the trap fashion laid for him,

Bailey has made his life a picturesque score,

an enigmatic exchange with women that gives him

the hope of surprising himself every day that dawns.

I don't mind if you put your hand in your hair and sort of...

Make a story, yeah?

-Anything you like. Whatever you do.

-So we start with something and then...

Yeah. I don't take many. Only do about... I don't do many.

Don't do click, click, click, click, click.

'The photographer that's closest to me,'

I think, is a French photographer.

I guess it's 1860s. Nadar, the French photographer.

And when I look at his pictures, I see my own pictures.

He knew what I know, or I know what he knew. Whatever.

Maybe up from your ear, look.

And then just tell me a story.

Lover's left you, yeah? That is the story.

'When I photograph people, directly they come through the door,

'I'm already photographing them.

'You watch the way they move and their personality.

'Which side of their face they prefer. All sorts of things.

'What kind of mood they're in.

'And it's like a Zen thing.

'If they're in a bad mood, then you encourage the bad mood.

'Then you get something from the picture.

'And if they're in a good mood, you encourage the good mood.'

It's your hair.

Stay like that.

'That's why I like my pictures, cos you can't really copy what I do

'because I don't do anything.

'I just do it with dialogue, talking to people.'

That hand is too ugly like that. Maybe just pull your scarf up.

HE SHOUTS

'I'm not looking for anything, I'm looking for that person.

'I'm looking for what they have, I'm not looking... I know what I have.

'I know my limitations, but I want to get these people to make them

'look like they have no limitations.

'It's from them, really.'

Don't move, you look great. That's great, look at me again like that.

'It's like being a vampire. I want to capture their personality.'

OK, I think we've got it. OK. Finished. You were great, yeah.

No, no! HE LAUGHS

Yeah, a style is really dangerous. You try to avoid it.

It's like being political.

When somebody says they're not political,

I mean the fact they say they're not political, they're already political.

So when I say I have no... I don't have any style...

I do, but I don't want it. I don't want the style. My style is nothing.

It's my way of making everything minimal.

It sounds really pretentious! Making everything minimal. And...

Just concentrating on the person and getting rid of everything else,

it's just the person I want.

That's the only thing I want, I don't want anything else,

I don't want their hands, I don't want them doing silly things

so they look like they're on the back of the book.

So it makes it harder for me cos I just want...

I want very sophisticated passport pictures.

Which are quite hard to do!

On these windswept Devon moors,

Bailey likes to reconnect with his loved ones in his country house,

far from the commotion of London.

DOG BARKS

Without concealing his admiration for surrealist poet Andre Breton,

he invites us into his cabinet of curiosities.

All our new pictures have been with skulls.

Now we're doing skulls and dead flowers.

-They're quite good, aren't they, Mark?

-They're great.

I don't know, if you think about things too much, it becomes...

You make them into a problem.

Don't you think? Got to do it. Doesn't matter.

Doesn't matter if people like it.

As long as you're happy.

Photography's all about death, really.

A sad thing about photography because...

When you look at pictures, old pictures, they're always dead.

And you look at a painting, you don't think, she's dead.

But you look at a photograph and you think, oh, she's dead.

You look at them...

It's the same with pornography, you know.

Pornography works much better in photography

than it does in...

..painting or illustration because you know it actually happened.

It's changed a bit now with digital.

Because now people think, everyone's cheating. It's what Count Basie said.

When they asked him what jazz was. We should say the same, what's art?

Count Basie said it's four beats to the bar and no cheating.

Which I try to make my pictures like that,

four beats to the bar and no cheating.

# Boom, boom, boom. #

Back in his London studio,

Bailey receives a visit from his friend Martin Harrison,

an art critic with whom he collaborated on several books.

They met in 1966, when Martin became Bailey's last-minute assistant on a Vogue shoot.

Get away from the tongue.

This is based on...

You know when the Queen goes to New Zealand and she meets the Maoris

and they poke their tongue out?

I thought the tongue is the only...

It's more sexual than any other piece of your body, really, because you taste with it...

-Put it up things.

-Whatever, yeah.

-Stick it in people's mouths.

-Whatever you do with it.

'I would say an important thing about Bailey, in his childhood,'

is his interest in birds.

People make jokes about that because he stayed interested

in what we called birds in England, of a long-legged variety.

-Storks!

-Storks!

Storks, it was.

But I think identifying birds and knowing what species a bird is

is actually part of this close looking again that he does.

And they're fleeting images, they fly off.

It's a fairly natural transition to me

from studying birds to being the man who captures

the fleeting moment of something that happens in the world, in life, with his camera.

And it's a thing that only one's known about for 15 years

or something and one didn't think of it with Bailey,

but he was at school and because he was dyslexic,

I'm sure he did know he was special, he was brilliant in some way.

He knew he was brilliant and they told him he was the opposite,

he was really stupid.

And I think a lot of what he's achieved

is borne out of the frustration of, "I will show them, then."

And he had to work out his own way and I think it's highly significant.

He's Britain's greatest photographer.

It's a visual medium, he looks through here,

he doesn't have to say words, the words are in the camera, in the image,

the words can be written about by weird people like me with nothing better to do.

So in a way I think it's important.

It's like the photograph of him when he's in the Royal Air Force

and he's probably still a teenager then, a little bit later on.

And he's sitting there on his bed with a Picasso on the wall.

People who come from an educated,

artistic background would probably not get how important this is.

How rare, how unique it was that someone like Bailey,

from the east end of London, would have a Picasso by his bed.

From the beginning, in a way, he found this possibility

to be incredibly articulate via visual images.

He found a way to condense and simplify and compress

and get the message across really, really rapidly.

It's like the Paul Valery thing,

it's the grin without the cat, just the essence of the idea.

I was an assistant to a fashion photographer called John French.

He wasn't a great photographer, but he was a kind, nice man.

I guess the thing I got from him was the white background

because he used a white background a lot. I thought, this is smart.

And then he helped me a lot to work for...

He got me a job taking pictures for the Daily Express.

And then Vogue saw the pictures and then they offered me a contract.

So that's how... And I was only an assistant, I think, for 11 months with him.

Homosexuality was sort of against the law then.

And John French was homosexual and the art director, John Parsons, at Vogue, was homosexual.

So there was a certain outsiderness about them, they were outside society.

And I think in those days...

..working class were sort of outside of society.

And so I think they accepted me because I was an outsider like them.

I think that kind of helped in the beginning.

John Parsons, being homosexual,

kind of liked the idea of someone from the working class

working for Vogue.

And I hope he liked my pictures as well, but it was...

I think it was an outsider thing.

Well, I mean, his early success in the '60s is still...

You can think up explanations for it, but it is a phenomenon.

Because for all that he was attractive

and the fashion editors liked him, some of them anyway,

he was unpolished

and raw, but you know, Vogue...

People think of fashion magazines as avant-garde.

Well, of course, they're homes of conservatism.

They're not remotely avant-garde, they're always behind everything.

People have a misperception about that.

In the '60s, there was this feeling of something happening in London,

and Vogue, as usual, was behind, and it was ruled over

by these old editors, "We can't have this on Vogue."

It's like the old BBC or something,

it was full of all sorts of covert censorship.

So the fact that he did thrive there is really...

It is quite a phenomenon because it's not totally easy to account for.

Except that they knew they were falling behind,

they knew that the average age of their readership was moving down

as young people started, for the first time in England, to have money to spend.

This is the usual commercial, market-driven thing.

This is all about, as Bailey puts it, shifting frocks.

It's a clothes-selling business.

He understood about all of the coded language of the clothing as well.

So when these fashion editors thought, who is this foul-mouthed young man

who's just trying to get the model into bed?

But he delivered the goods, you know.

He gave them wonderful pictures. It is quite simple in one sense.

He came out with this picture which was graphically much more dynamic than his competitors,

the other young photographers who might have wanted to be number one in London and they weren't.

Make that... Let me...

No, who told you to move? Go back to where you were.

Come on. Back to where you were. Good. And that little...hand. Yeah.

Good. There. That's good. Stay like that.

Bring this, slowly, bring this hand down. More, more, more.

And put it there.

Go on, lower down, on your thigh or whatever it's called. Good.

That's good. Look at me. Don't twist away, just keep where you are.

Good girl. Good. There. That's lovely.

It's rather tender. I mean, this is that other side of Bailey.

This is the birdwatching side.

There is a more sensitive side to the beast.

But I absolutely know for a fact,

and I have it from contemporary witnesses who are probably now dead,

that it was perceived...

It genuinely was perceived in London as being something revolutionary.

And I just think it's because first of all, she's not standing

and she's not looking haughty.

She's kneeling over in this way and there's a squirrel.

You know, a stuffed squirrel, dead squirrel, rather awkward,

it's like a Monty Python sketch, isn't it?

But there it is.

And that was perceived as undermining of a haughty,

upper, upper middle-class way of approaching fashion,

with women with their heads, you know, looking like this.

It was indeed undermining of that.

And it was a very bold move for this very young beginner.

I'd already been playing with photography

since I was about 11 or 12.

I used to like the magic of the chemicals.

It was nothing artistic, it was just...

I just had my mother's Brownie.

And then I saw this picture when I was about 17, I guess...

of Cartier-Bresson, of these three or four, five ladies

overlooking the Himalayas, I guess, or I don't know...

Definitely in northern India by the looks of it.

And it made such an impact, this picture,

that I thought, there's more to photography than I realised.

And I guess this picture showed me

that photography could have the same depth as painting.

And I'd never really considered it before.

The first thing visual I remember were Hollywood movies.

I loved the way they used to light things, even as a kid.

I was fascinated by John Ford movies and Hitchcock, for sure.

And then later, I liked very much the French new wave,

and then the Italians, I liked very much Fellini,

who suffocated you with bad taste!

And then Visconti, that suffocated you with good taste!

My biggest influence in a funny sort of way is Picasso.

The thing that Picasso taught me was that there's no rules.

He taught me that a circle doesn't have to be round.

Which was a good lesson.

OK, that's a great look. I love it! I love it! I love you, Samantha.

Yeah, good. Chin up a bit.

So many Samanthas in my life at the moment. Yeah, that's good. Yeah.

Didn't you ever see High Society? Grace Kelly.

She's called Samantha and she's so beautiful,

and you look beautiful, so you're Samantha.

-I thought you'd worked that one out!

-I'll be Samantha, then.

I photographed her a couple of times. But she was a bitch. Good.

You look devastating.

OK. Still devastater.

Good, wonderful. Yeah, still. That's beautiful, isn't it?

Isn't she beautiful?

Good, I love you, darling, you're great. Good. Don't move.

In 1960, Bailey fell, professionally and personally,

for the amazing photogenic potential of Jean Shrimpton,

a fragile, slightly gauche young model.

I think most talent is inborn.

So Jean had an advantage because she was very beautiful.

With Jean, she didn't scare people,

like my wife or Christy Turlington there.

She was...attractive to everybody.

From dogs to intellectuals.

She had one of those democratic... I don't know what you call it,

beauties, in a way.

She was a democratic beauty everybody could appreciate.

Possibly, she could live next door.

Some women are so beautiful, you can't believe they live next door.

They live in some fantasy world.

I mean, it was a two-way thing.

She looked wonderful and people thought she did

and people wanted her.

So of course it was helpful to Bailey and I'm sure

he got to do some things because a magazine wanted Jean Shrimpton.

She was the face of the time, you know.

One of the most sustained examples of that

is his first ever big foreign trip for Vogue, to New York,

which is where he really wanted to go because he was such a great jazz fan.

Another one of his differences all through his life.

And he really, for him, the bonus was to get to see

some of the great jazz men in the clubs in New York that he'd admired.

But he was with Jean Shrimpton, who he was in love with then.

And his idea was just to photograph her on the streets of New York.

By 1963, his style was getting settled into something

more generally studio orientated, usually on a plain background,

and the movement, the areas of it that broke it down from, say,

icy perfection, would be movements of limbs subtly done,

the way a leg protruded forward,

graphic things that he understood very well and got very quickly.

But always usually some contact between him and the girl,

which I guess is through the eyes, from the woman, as you must say now.

Which was sexually charged.

I mean, someone else may interpret them differently,

but they don't seem...

There is a kind of respect, I think, a genuine one,

for the woman in there, still.

Well, come on, I haven't got anything more to say,

I've said my lot twice.

At the height of his fame, Bailey flirted briefly with film

and planned an adaptation of A Clockwork Orange

with the Rolling Stones.

He fulfilled his movie making dream with GG Passion,

a very personal short film

inspired by Cocteau's The Blood Of A Poet,

that tells the story of a rock star chased to his death.

SCREAMING

Quite naturally,

Bailey found himself at the heart of the British cultural revolution

while keeping his distance from the new celebrity lifestyle.

Except for his friendship with Mick Jagger,

his relationship with the stars of swinging London

rarely went beyond an intense half-hour's work in his studio.

So when his Box Of Pin-Ups came out, we were back to this

kind of old British, probably high Tory, moral panic, you know.

It was only a year or so since the Lady Chatterley trials,

another one of our famous events, which is a kind of marker

of an old order gradually being removed, in a way.

And old censorships and so on.

And there was indeed a lot of reaction at the time

because you had royalty in the shape of Lord Snowdon,

and some of our major criminals, the Kray brothers, in the same book.

I spent two weeks with them, but then we couldn't use the pictures

because there was a court case so we had to change the story.

That's as simple as that, really.

They were just a part of my youth, really, because people didn't see

much difference between the police or the gangsters in the East End.

They were pretty much the same thing.

Bailey takes us,

along with his assistant Mark and daughter Paloma,

to the street in London's East End

where he grew up, now a Bangladeshi neighbourhood.

It's where I spent my joyous childhood.

'When I was that big, I suppose, six,

'I went to see Bambi

'and small cartoons in the cinema.

'And then one of Hitler's V2 rockets destroyed the cinema at Upton Park.

'From that moment on, I thought Hitler had killed Bambi

'and Mickey Mouse and everybody.'

This was all bombed flat. These are all bombed buildings.

He was the devil.

When I was bad, they didn't say the devil would get you

or the bogeyman would get you, they said Hitler will get you.

I thought, "Who is this Hitler guy?"

He was just a name.

I didn't realise he was one of the biggest arseholes of all time.

That's where my mum used to look out the window.

That's where I spent most of the war, down that hole.

-Whose was this room?

-That was my mother's bedroom.

-OK.

And you were on the top floor at the back?

When we first moved in, we only had the ground floor.

This wall was all broken down. That wall wasn't there.

-So the cellar where you did your black and white processing, scratched it against the wall.

-Yeah.

And I stole those angel wings from a church. And I hid them down there.

-They're probably still down there.

-You stole from a church?

-Well, it was bombed.

Later, I tried to photograph me looking like Chet Baker,

when I was about 16, because I wanted to look like Chet Baker.

Because Chet Baker was my hero. Chet Baker and James Dean, I guess.

I think he was charming, my father, I didn't know him that much.

I never saw him that much, he was always scallywagging,

up to no good, I think, with women.

And my mother was kind of like a tough old gypsy.

She even looked like a gypsy.

1965.

French actress Catherine Deneuve marries David Bailey in London.

It's a clear exaggeration to portray Bailey as a Pygmalion-type figure

or to claim that women made him.

However, Antonioni drew heavily on his life to create the character

of fashion photographer Thomas, who is dragged into a murder case.

I didn't know Antonioni.

It was, er...

It wasn't Antonioni's idea to do Blow-Up, it was Carlo Ponti.

Carlo Ponti sent two people to see me at Vogue studios.

I was 24, or something, and he said, "These two Italian men came in, they looked like Mafia.

They said, "Do you want to make a movie?" I said, "Yeah, sure.

"What are we doing, the remake of Citizen Kane?"

They said, "No, do you want to make a movie about a photographer?" I said, "Sure."

At that age you do anything, you remake Ivan The Terrible.

And, er...

We talked in their bad English

and they said about the way I dressed.

I said, "What's the way I dress got anything to do with it?"

Then I realised they wanted me to be in the movie to play the part.

I said, "No, you must be crazy!"

I can't remember a telephone number the right way round, let alone do a dialogue of script.

So, that was the end of that.

I didn't know how they knew so many details in Blow-Up

You know, how they knew I paid £8 for the propeller.

I've still got the propeller, it's in the country in the store room.

And, ten years after Blow-Up I was doing a book with, er...

Box Of Pin-ups with Francis Wyndham, journalist for the Sunday Times.

He was drinking and he said, "Bailey, I've got a confession."

He said, "I wrote the 200-page synopsis for Antonioni."

That suddenly cleared it up. I said, "Why didn't you tell me before?"

He said he was too embarrassed. I said, "I don't care. I mean, you make a few bob, good luck to you."

I don't care who wrote it. That's the story, really, not very interesting.

Let's play tennis.

LAUGHTER

If Blow-Up prefigured the disillusionment of the late '60s

Bailey echoed it, in a way, in a new series of portraits

published under the title, Goodbye Baby And Amen.

Next he launched into a series of documentaries.

That's marvellous, Penelope, just like that.

Good, your fingers straighter.

I want you to look ecstatic. You must be inspired.

Don't smile, no, very serious.

What I like about Cecil, he's got a great deal of the outrageous in him.

I mean, he insists on the outrageous.

He likes all the limits, doesn't he?

-Well, he certainly goes to extremes.

-Yes.

He can be extremely kind or extremely rude.

He's very positive, he's not a negative person.

He loves. It's very easy for him to love.

He positively loves you, or he positively hates you.

LAUGHTER

I don't want to be interviewed about my private life.

Oh, God.

-What do you want to be asked? What do you like me to ask you?

-Nothing.

If you could change anything in your life, would you change anything, the way you've lived?

No, it's too late now to change anything in my life.

More move...

CAMERA CLICKS

No, it's enough, I think.

That's not enough.

I mean, when you were say six or seven, did you have fantasies?

No, when I was more twenty.

LAUGHTER

But, did you have fantasies, there's some questions here.

What were your fantasies when you were a child?

Was Elvis Presley your fantasy?

No, I used to play The Doors.

-Hello?

-Andy, it's me.

-Hi.

-What's Pop Art?

I want to try and ask you.

What is it?

I'm very confused.

In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.

Why do you keep your clothes on?

Erm, I'm afraid to look at my scars,

so I just jump into bed.

-Your scars?

-Yeah.

Can we talk about your scars?

Oh, yeah.

-That was from when you got shot, your accident?

-Yeah.

It must have been awful.

Oh no, I look like a Dior dress.

He's gone on his super go, hasn't he?

-They speak to people by radio, don't they?

-Yeah.

Like the bike taxis in London.

Look at that cloud, Mark, it's sort of perfect.

-Good line.

-Yeah, it's only good for live action. It's not good for stills.

-No.

Look... Perfect.

John Ford would have liked that.

With a soul of a reporter, whose worst fear is boredom

and going through the motions in studio,

Bailey has travelled the world since the early '70s,

like an explorer of the often tragic human condition.

If I ever go to places like that, to do pictures, I try to do them straight away

because, after a week there, you kind of get used to things.

It's er...

The moment I'm off the plane...

Usually the most interesting images are the ones you do immediately

because you haven't been tamed by what you're seeing,

it's still all new and "why".

-You see this pony?

-Yeah.

-It's the remains of the pit ponies.

-Yeah.

-Where they've got the short, stumpy, little legs.

-Oh, I see.

He's not a Dartmoor pony.

-No, I think they're going to disappear, aren't they?

-Mmm.

You get inspiration from things that are not your thing.

It's good to move out our your own environment, sometimes.

We have done documentary things, but it's usually for charity.

It's a bit odd going somewhere to be paid to go and photograph starving people.

I did it for Mother Teresa in India.

I did it for UNESCO, or somebody, in Ethiopia.

I did it in the Sudan.

Depressing pictures...

But...

You know, dying babies and we went back in the afternoon and they were dead.

But, it's er...

I never charge for those pictures.

You know, somebody standing next to me would get the same picture.

So, it's just documentation, really.

Everything in life bounces off, doesn't it?

It's sort of everything, it's everything...

The more you see, the more you accumulate.

Spring 2010...

Working for a charity, Bailey flies out on a mission with British troops stationed in Afghanistan.

The reason I did the soldiers, and the reason I wanted to do the charity,

one of the reasons was that it was very personal.

I've got two sons, who are more or less that age, or becoming that age.

One is the age and one's becoming that age, that...

Could be sent there to fight and be maimed.

'I thought it was...

'as much as I'm against wars, I think it's a worthwhile thing

'to do anything you can to help those guys.

'They like the idea that I'd been in the air force.

'You know, it gave me a kind of...

'It lets you join the club, so to speak.'

Yeah.

Yeah, and this is the only flower I think I saw in Afghanistan.

Beautiful.

Um, Paloma?

Can you bring down the box of bones?

Bones?

They're the bones with the skull in it. They're upstairs in the thing.

They're at the top.

'My only problem is the race against death.

'You know, fucking... I got the reaper on my back all the time.'

'They say all the best things are accidents.

'How can you be creative? You have to have an accident.

'It's the accident that's exciting.

'I suppose, in a way, you can set up the accident

'and then hope it'll happen.'

We need some a lizard, really, on that.

'I think if the photographer's good,

'the reality is in the photographer's mind.

'If it's just someone going "Snap!" it's just a document, it's not even...

'The other day, I suddenly realised I'd taken a picture that looked like an Irving Penn picture.

'It was just putting a skull on top of a skull

'and I actually did it to imitate a John Lennon picture

'of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, with the head above it,

'and I thought if I put the skull on top of the skull,

'it'll look like John and Paul.'

There you go, Joe. It's gone again.

'So it's odd how sometimes you arrive at the same destination without...

'Not starting from the same point or not starting from anywhere.'

It looks great. It's definitely death.

It doesn't look like anything I've seen before either, either.

It's not harping back to any kind of... I meant the last picture.

It's not harping back to any kind of reference.

It's completely photography.

'It's all about the past, really. The flowers die.

'The skulls become nature's sculptures.

'That's the ultimate sculpture, in the end.

'It's the skull or skeleton of birds or people.

'So they're kind of portraits of skulls, in a way.'

Back once more to his London studio,

a refuge far removed from the pain of the world

where Bailey lives and works, surrounded by the people he loves,

this morning, his friend Jerry Hall pays him a visit.

I love that but I'd never seen that.

Oh, that was for a charity I did.

-That's so lovely.

-Mickey Mouse as Hitler.

JERRY LAUGHS

No, it was Charlie Chaplin.

No, it was Hitler, but I pretended it was Charlie Chaplin.

-You started with me when you were 16, you bitch.

-I know. I know.

-But you know...

-Were you a virgin?

David, don't you remember?

HE LAUGHS

Women are strange animals.

SHE LAUGHS

Yeah.

Still trying to work it out.

I think you got lucky this time.

-I was lucky every time.

-I know.

-They were all great.

I know, but this one's lasted an awful long time.

-Yeah, lucky girl.

-And three children. Fantastic.

I have a great time working with him. I love working with him.

He makes me laugh. The day goes by very nicely. It's pleasant.

Thing about Bailey is he's not someone...

you know, he has dyslexia, so he's not very articulate.

It's not about words, it's about instinct and it's about his vision.

So he works more, you know, in watching, paying close attention.

And when he's looking at you, you feel what he's looking,

you feel more beautiful, more sexy.

You start to feel, you know,

it's a very intuitive business, being photographed, you know.

It's not something you can talk and say,

"OK, do this, do that,"

because it's a different part of your brain, you know.

It's the magic part. And Bailey's very good at that.

There's a kind of silence,

a kind of silent language that goes on

between a model and a photographer, you know.

You know, it's like when someone loves you.

It brings out the best in you.

You know, when you feel the look of someone who loves you,

you just sort of blossom, you know.

And I think that happens with a great photographer, with Bailey.

I think he...he adores women, and he adores beauty,

and I think he admires it so much that he brings it out in you.

That's my ex-wife, one of my ex-wives. That's Marie Helvin.

Angelica.

It's beautiful, that picture.

It's beautiful.

'Women...'

Jean Shrimpton.

'..have changed my life.'

Which is an obvious thing to say, but somehow...different...

I can see how my photography changed with different women. It's odd.

Jerry with Helmut.

Trying to put on her shoes. Really odd.

'I think if you think too much about these things,

'you become too self-conscious, so you've got to avoid that.

'As you get older, you don't care anyway. Who cares?'

And my mum.

I don't know, I think it's very flattering to be a muse

to a great photographer or a great artist.

I think it's wonderful. Kind of magical.

Makes you immortal, in some way.

Come on, Kate.

She's so beautiful, Kate Moss, isn't she?

She's so beautiful without being beautiful. It's amazing.

She's just...beautiful.

She's the only one that's like Jean Shrimpton.

Only known two models that were like this.

Jean Shrimpton and Kate Moss.

They're unique.

You can't understand it. I can't understand it.

It's like, there's nothing special about the Mona Lisa but, you know,

it's a painting, but it's got some...something you can't explain.

You know, why?

I'm sort of lucky cos...

..in my personal life...

I've got such a great wife.

She's the opposite to a midget. She's a bit too tall, in fact.

She's the best thing that ever happened to me.

Maybe.

Besides being born.

The whatsit tree should be all right. The Magnolia.

Mark, have you seen the Magnolia?

'She's a beauty in the classical sense. She's a sort of...

'Roman beauty, really.

'I mean, the Sistine Chapel, I mean the Sistine Chapel Museum of busts,

'she's got the long neck and the big eyes, the smallish head.

'So she just looks like one of those Roman busts to me, really.'

'And, um...

'something you can't put your finger on. A mystery,

'it's a mystery really.'

A bit silly doing this.

This is the graveyard.

Lots of dead people in here.

Welcome.

-That's her father who has turned into a...

-Magnolia tree.

-Magnolia tree.

-Called Star Wars.

-Is it?

-It's called Star Wars, yes!

I brought these back in that same helicopter, Mark.

The fern?

No, these great big Monterey pines.

Catherine, is David a good father?

I'm her husband, not her father.

LAUGHTER

Yes, he is.

SHE LAUGHS

As long as they do what they're told.

-You are, aren't you?

-I'm all right.

Ask if I'm a good lover, not if I'm a good father.

-IMITATES HIM:

-Ask if I'm a good lover.

-He's got his...

He's going to see it in a minute, isn't he?

DOG GROWLS

I think life's the main subject in Bailey's work.

He does everything.

His curiosity is endless.

God, the French Revolution

-would have loved your fucking neck, wouldn't they?

-Yeah(!)

LAUGHTER

He wants to know everything. He's, um...

Even if he goes to the doctor,

he won't talk about what's wrong with him.

He wants to know about the doctor. He wants to know everything about everyone.

The questions he asks,

and I'm always amazed people answer them!

SHE LAUGHS

I think because he has the curiosity, in a way, of a child.

And the way he asks questions,

they're not insulting, they're questions.

Just, like, "click, click" and then do it.

'In fact, the extraordinary is probably less exciting than the ordinary'

because you can always find something interesting in the ordinary.

People say, "Who's the most interesting person you've ever photographed?"

Everybody I photograph is interesting,

if you want to look into them and find out more about them.

'I mean, I'm just happy to wake up every day

'so I can find out something new.'

I love that.

That's like a cock in a cunt.

Fucking big cunt.

Good.

He has a way of making it seem flippant.

But one thing, he's not a joker.

He takes what he does very, very seriously.

And I think that's part of it.

And it's the dedication and working all the time, working at it.

And he's never satisfied. It's always a disappointment.

So he just wants to do better.

His disappointment doesn't make him give up,

it makes him do more.

Hang on, I'll tell you what I'll do.

Chin up.

Yeah? Perfect.

Now...

Really quick, quick.

SHUTTER RELEASES REPEATEDLY

You have to be really quick.

Change immediately. Immediately.

Look straight at me.

# When everything falls apart

# And all disappears

# And you hold me in your arms

# I'm... I'm whole again

# I want this feeling

# I want this feeling

# This feeling to linger on. #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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