Claude Virgin; good Guardian obituary (fashion photographer)
Hyfler/Rosner
His camera recorded fashion of the late 50s and early 60s -
cool with an edge of beat
Veronica Horwell
Wednesday December 13, 2006
Guardian
Fashion between 1958 and 1964 had an interim identity,
distinct from the Dior era that preceded it and the pop
period that succeeded it, and has since eclipsed its memory.
The mode was adult and cool, with an edge of beat. The
photographer who responded to it was Claude Virgin, who has
died aged 78.
He left home in Atlanta, Georgia, for 1950s New York. There
he was taken on as assistant by Louis Faurer, who besides
his primary project of photographing Manhattan also shot for
the glossies, including Harper's Bazaar, which was art
directed by Alexey Brodovitch. Virgin was not a formal
alumnus of Brodovitch's Design Laboratory classes, but he
absorbed their modernist aesthetic: the original eye, the
sculptural composition, the prohibition of mess or fuss -
every image stripped down and pared away. That made him a
younger sibling of Brodey's boys, Irving Penn and Richard
Avedon, and his first work for American Vogue shared their
sense of clear air flowing all around the models' three
dimensions.
Virgin accepted British Vogue's invitation to join it in
1957, perhaps to escape junior status in New York. Certainly
he responded immediately to both a trad, Ian Flemingesque
Mayfair (he wore Savile Row tailoring and drove an Aston
Martin) and to the Chelsea of Mary Quant's Bazaar boutique,
established in 1955, and of her friend Terence Conran with
his new Design Group; both were modernism inflected with
English eccentricity. Virgin rented a studio off the King's
Road, equidistant from art students drinking at the Chelsea
Potter, avant-garde audiences at the Royal Court Theatre and
spooners of onion soup at the Bistro restaurant.
The move liberated Virgin. Helmut Newton, also a new arrival
in Britain, described Virgin's London photographs as "sexy
and different from anything seen before in England"; they
were not exactly classless, but they defined class not as
birth or wealth but as wit and elegance. In London, Virgin
could allow himself a slight softness in close-up, or
experiment with colour Norman Parkinson-style (May 1961's
cover of a pink ensemble against a Matisse-patterned
background). He welcomed unusual assignments, taking
portraits of Nancy Kwan filming The World of Suzie Wong
among the Hong Kong slums in 1959. He gave a ruthless twist
to the more staid Paris couturiers, such as Nina Ricci, and
was in total accord with Yves Saint Laurent's 1960 haute
beat collection - modernism seamed in crocodile and trimmed
in black mink.
Virgin appreciated the elaborate cosmetics in fashion, the
equal and heavy stress on brows and lips, the enamelled lids
and pencilled beauty spots. In his famed 1960 Vogue cover,
Sue Lloyd splays lacquered talons in counterpoint to an
ash-tipped cigarette in a holder. Underneath her mad high
hat, there has to be a sprayed beehive hairdo.
The natural was not Virgin's forte. His models were in their
20s, and mature - their layered slap would have looked
grotesque on a teen. In the early 1960s, he expanded from
Vogue to Town and Queen magazines, where the emerging
aesthetic, youth-based and less disciplined, began to
displace the Brodovitch dicta. Goodbye to nights betting on
chemin-de-fer and days laying out pages aerated with white
space: hello op-art and pop. The newer fellers, David
Bailey, Terence Donovan, did not pose models in stilettos in
a studio off the King's Road, they shot them running in
minis along it. When Antonioni came to London to research
Blow-Up, he consulted Virgin. But the only aspect of Virgin
visible in the 1966 film was a wooden propeller used as a
prop; Virgin had one on his studio wall, in harmony with his
Mies van de Rohe chairs. He was too much the Anglophile gent
for Antonioni, who based his snapper on Bailey instead. You
cannot imagine the David Hemmings character belonging to a
club in St James, as Virgin did. Or even wanting to belong.
Absolutely no orgies.
Virgin did not immediately depart the scene. Advertising
paid well for his sophistication, and he contributed cover
images to less prestigious titles. However, before he was
40, he accepted that he was out of temper with the tone, and
tunes, of the times. Rock was not jazz, and hippies were not
graphic chic. He gave up the professional camera. He lost
much of his money in under-researched ventures, but
stabilised to a quiet life.
With first wife, Margaret Barch, he had a daughter: with his
second, Jillie Bateman, two sons. Both marriages ended in
divorce.
· Claude Ambrose Virgin, fashion photographer, born June 8
1928; died December 1 2006