26 18 April 2020 I http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk I subscribe 0330 333 1113
CECIL BEATON
at what you’re doing and I love
it. Do you feel we can turn this
Bright Young Things into
an exhibition?” There’s a sort of
hilariousness about the fact that it
was a digital intervention that
made this exhibition come to life.
I didn’t need to do a proposal – the
National Portrait Gallery just saw
what I was doing and we turned it
into the show.’
Was choosing the exhibition’s
images a long process?
‘It was. I kind of knew exactly the
people I wanted to focus on, which
was this “Bright Young Things”
movement. I knew who the key
players were... Stephen Tennant,
Daphne du Maurier, Rex
Whistler, William Walton, the
Sitwells, the Jungman sisters. Once
I’d got my list of names, I had to see
whether Beaton had actually
photographed them, because
nobody gets into the show unless
Beaton had some sort of
relationship with them.
‘You spend an awful lot of time
talking to people, looking on the
internet, going to all kinds of out-of-
the-way archives just in case there’s
something there. I’ve got a lot of
photographs from an awful lot of
lenders to this show. A lot of them
are from private collections and a
lot are from institutions like the
Met in New York and the Museum
of the City of New York – most
museums have some sort of
holding of Beaton’s work. Trying to
narrow it down to this sort of
specific group of people was time
Below: Edith Sitwell
at Sussex Gardens
by Cecil Beaton,
19 2 6Below left: Maxine
Freeman-Thomas
dressed for Ascot in
the year 2000 for
the Dream of Fair
Women Ball by
Cecil Beaton, 1928consuming and fantastic. It’s great
that these treasures have
unearthed themselves.
‘I scour auction house records to
see what Cecil Beaton pictures have
done and then, once you’ve found
the picture that, say, sold at
Sotheby’s in 1992, you play this sort
of very strange dance where
Sotheby’s acts as a “dead letter
drop”. So, I write a note to this
anonymous buyer of Cecil Beaton’s
photographs; Sotheby’s passes it on
and I hope that at the other end that
the guy or the girl will tell the
person that’s bought it still has it
and will agree to lend it. There are
all these kind of strange patterns,
paths and mazes that you go
through to try and locate the
pictures you want. This is why
exhibitions such as this take quite a
lot of time to do.’So what exactly is in the
exhibition?
‘You’ll be confronted by about 140
images. I always think that you’ve
got to leave people wanting more.
The images all look very beautiful
as we’ve got some lovely antique
frames. It’ll be very much a
Beatonesque installation and
we’ll go quite over-the-top with the
sort of Beatonesque design –
pillars, verre eglomisé, mirrors,
silver and so on.
‘This is all about surface sheen
and how beautiful he can make his
sitters look... how they never
dreamed they could be as beautiful
as Beaton has made them. It’s a sort
of complete celebration of thesuperficial in early 20th century
photography. I don’t think it’s any
the worse for that – you’ve got very
beautiful objects as well. It’s split
into various sections. There’s a little
section to begin with on Beaton as a
child, a boy growing up. We’re also
showing his very first camera,
which we’ve borrowed from the Fox
Talbot Museum.’Where do you put Cecil Beaton in
the pantheon of great
photographers?
‘With regards to being a
photographer I don’t think there is
anyone, in the context of Vog ue and
fashion and portrait photography of
a certain kind, that really has the
range in the 20th century that
Beaton had. He was very lucky to be
starting out in the ’20s, which was a
very fertile time, and he was luckyRight: Nancy and
Baba Beaton by
Cecil Beaton, 1926