A Coruña,
There are not too many photographers still alive that can be affirmed without hesitation that they will contribute to forge the history of their environment in the last century: one of them is the London David Bailey, whom the National Portrait Gallery of London and the PAC of Milan provided a retrospective now a decade ago and whose career reviews this summer the Marta Ortega Pérez Foundation in A Coruña.
For their goal, celebrities of music, art and cinema passed, such as Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson, Andy Warhol, Dalí, Damien Hirst, Francis Bacon, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, but also anonymous individuals, occasionally found in his multiple trips, which he knew how to convert into memorable for all. He immortalized scenes that captured, as few, the London atmosphere of the sixties, some starring Jean Shrimpton, who was his muse and couple, and Penelope Tree; And also models, many, because it has been one of the head of the header of Voguethat arm it in an exclusive contract from those sixties, although it was not the land where it was most comfortable.
Breaking the rigid norms that had guided the previous authors dedicated to those genres, those of portrait and fashion, channeled the novelties of street culture at the time of the Swinging London and from them built the freshness that has characterized their style: open, dynamic, natural, focused on beauty without rules. He did it with effort, facing a dyslexia that dragged from childhood and was not diagnosed to thirty (his advice for beginners is that The more you work, the more luck you will have) and trusting in the magic of the analog against digital photography that allows erase, and therefore, assures, Delete the mystery.
The exhibition that now hosts the MOP Foundation, open until September 14, is its first anthology in Spain and has been curated by Tim Marlow, director of the design museum of London, and Camera Eye, the study of the photographer. It has almost 150 jobs, some unpublished, mostly dated in those sixties and seventies dominated by energy, cultural and creative, very particular.
Diana Vreeland, one of her editors in Vogue, found the key: Irving Penn’s study is like a cathedral; David Bailey’s study is like a drink bar.
The tour begins practically at the beginning: by a sequence of photos of Jean Shrimpton, one of the first it girlstrend transformer with their thinness and androgynous appearance, to pay attention to David Bailey’s Box of Pin-upsa portfolio of 1965 that collects at about thirty members of the London scene, from Mick Jagger to Rudolf Nuréyev, passing through the Shrimpton herself, its partner also Catherine Deneuve, the actor quintessence of the English Michael Caine, the photographer Cecil Beaton and, despite agitated debates in the time Reggie Kray, Discoles members of the Bailey circle. Of the artist’s wild character, he realizes that he had for the worst of his crimes that would have been photographed by him; Actually, the dissemination of his faces ended his mafia career.
In addition to his photos, we will see some of his objects, carefully selected and representative of the peculiarities of his festive study on the coruña dock, so close to the personalities of most of his visitors. Diana Vreeland, one of her editors in Voguefound the key: Irving Penn’s study is like a cathedral; David Bailey’s study is like a drink bar.
Like the previous four previous exhibitions of the MOP Foundation, this Bailey also offers the public a short film made for the occasion reinterpreting that Box of pin-ups of the author and a free publication that is inspired by Ritzthe journal of celebrities, fashion and gossip that Bailey founded with David Litchfield in 1976.
The entrance to the sample is free and the benefits generated by the sale of merchandising will be allocated to the program Future Storiessupporting young creators at the beginning of their career.
“David Bailey’s Changing Fashion”
MOP Foundation
Av. Jardines de Méndez Núñez, s/n
A Coruña
From June 28 to September 14, 2025
