Hyfler/Rosner
2006-12-05 02:52:06 UTC
Claude Virgin
'Vogue' photographer of the Fifties and Sixties with a
reputation for creative exuberance
The Independent
05 December 2006
Anthony Haden-Guest
Loading Image...
Nowhere in the Britain of the late Fifties and the Sixties
would you find such a mix of the talented and the original,
the raffish and the beautiful as you would on the King's
Road, Chelsea. Even amongst this stiff opposition, the
photographer Claude Virgin cut an unforgettable figure.
Virgin was born in 1928 in Atlanta, Georgia. He moved to New
York to work as a photographer, was hugely influenced by the
great art director of Harper's Bazaar Alexey Brodovitch, and
worked as an assistant for the terrific photographer Louis
Faurer. Then British Vogue brought him to London to give the
mostly fuddy-duddy fashion world some American snap.
"Claude arrived in London the same day as Helmut Newton,"
remembers Willie Landels, former Editor of Harpers & Queen:
They both went to dinner with the then Editor of Vogue,
Audrey Withers. She asked, "Mr Newton, what are you going to
do for us?"
"Uh. Take some pictures . . ."
She turned to Claude and said, "And you, Mr Virgin? What are
you going to do?"
"Oh," he said, "lots of brass! I'm going to put a lot of
brass on these girls. Make them look very brassy!"
He meant lots of jewels.
Actually there was very little brassiness about Virgin's
work, which had a clean, elegant line, an instinctual sense
of composition, and in which the models seemed frequently to
exhale a feline, "grown-up" femaleness. As Newton wrote in
his memoirs, "His photographs were sexy and different from
anything seen before in England."
Soon Virgin had become one of the hardest-working
photographers at British Vogue and had picked up a
reputation for creative exuberance. For instance, while he
was shooting the Paris collections, he told the
editor-on-the-spot that one of the fur coats was too long.
That was just the way it was, he was told. Was not. He
scissored a foot off the bottom.
Michelangelo Antonioni must have heard such stories because
when he arrived in London to begin work on Blow-Up (1966),
Virgin was, I think, the first photographer he visited. But
he settled on David Bailey as the template for the character
played by David Hemmings. Things were changing. According to
British Vogue, Virgin's work was "suddenly outmoded by
homegrown photographers like David Bailey and Brian Duffy".
There is truth to that. But not the whole truth.
I met Claude Virgin in the Bistro, a restaurant off Sloane
Square, run by a warm-hearted tyrant, Elisabeth Furse, my
mother. Virgin was an habitué. We became friendly and
together took over a sprawling double studio behind the
Pheasantry on the King's Road. It goes without saying that a
photographer's fashion and beauty studio was not a horrible
place for a young man - I was down from Cambridge - to be.
And Claude Virgin was its most entertaining element.
Virgin was addicted to certain forms of Britishry - he
joined a club on St James's, he drove an Aston Martin and he
would always work wearing a shirt, a tie and one of several
well-broken-in Savile Row suits - but he was also a hardcore
Modernist. The studio seating consisted mostly of Mies van
de Rohe "Barcelona" chairs. The art included a supposed
Rothko and Virgin's portrait, painted by a friend, Donald
Cammell, but the principal wall adornment was a huge wooden
aeroplane propeller.
It was the early Sixties. Virgin was no longer the hot Vogue
photographer but had plenty of work, both in fashion and
advertising, and could be as quirky as ever. Landels
remembers a shoot for Queen. "There was this hat," he says:
"He thought it was very dull. So he tore off the leg of his
pyjamas. They were striped pyjamas. And put the leg of the
pyjama around the hat and made it look terribly glamorous.
Not all the inspirations came off. There was the legendary,
perhaps apocryphal, cover shot of a veiled bride. Only when
the magazines had been printed did somebody spot that the
veil looked a bit, um, black. The issue was not, apparently,
a hot seller.
Virgin was close to many women, including some former
models, but he had a longstanding girlfriend and was in no
sense a womaniser. Indeed, he could be rather a disapproving
neighbour. I returned to the Pheasantry one afternoon to
find that an interior wall had sprouted between our studios.
Relations warmed up again. An openable door appeared in the
wall.
We worked together on projects from time to time. He took a
suite of photographs of the vivacious actress Sue Lloyd for
the magazine Town in which I was a foil. He took it into his
head to use me for a beer marketing campaign, kitted me up
in a bowler hat and blasted away on tests, spewing out many
dozen rolls in as many minutes. To my unspeakable relief,
the campaign was killed. This had nothing to do with the
pictures, which were pure Virgin, sharp and clear. The
drawback, I fear, was the model.
Virgin did indeed secede from photography, but it was
nothing to do with distaste for the work of Bailey, Duffy
and Terry Donovan, which he admired. It was more that he
represented the neo-classic aesthetic of the Chelsea Set.
The emergent Swinging London seemed a foreign land, not the
country to which he had moved, and he had no desire to take
pictures of its raffish, romantic inhabitants.
His attempt to frame another life for himself was in its way
magnificent. He was always liable to enthusiasms. One of his
closer friends, who worked in the City, persuaded him that
copper was the Next Big Thing. Virgin installed a
ticker-tape machine in his bedroom and I would listen, awed,
to his misadventures in the copper trade. The results were
both comic and tragic, but mostly the latter. He lost six
figures.
Claude Virgin's post-photography years were pleasant enough.
In 1969 he married, as his second wife, Jillie Bateman. They
put two sons, James and Henry, through Harrow. The marriage
endured until 1986. James is a fund-raiser for Harrow. Henry
writes, paints and plans to import green tea from China.
Claude developed other enthusiasms, genealogy (his own)
being one.
He never changed his mind about his reasons for giving up
full-time photography. In perhaps our last conversation, a
few months ago, he gleefully recalled a conversation with
the glamorous hipster-aristo Nico, Marchioness of
Londonderry. "I said, Nico, why are you wasting your time
with those silly pop people?" he said. That would be Mick
Jagger, whom his friend Donald Cammell was in 1970 to
co-direct in Performance.
As with several photographers of the Fifties, Sixties and
Seventies, including indeed his sometime boss Louis Faurer,
Virgin's work has not yet come into its own. It will. Count
on that.
Claude Ambrose Virgin, photographer: born Atlanta, Georgia 8
June 1928; married 1951 Margaret Barch (one daughter;
marriage dissolved), 1969 Jillie Bateman (two sons; marriage
dissolved 1986); died London 1 December 2006.
'Vogue' photographer of the Fifties and Sixties with a
reputation for creative exuberance
The Independent
05 December 2006
Anthony Haden-Guest
Loading Image...
Nowhere in the Britain of the late Fifties and the Sixties
would you find such a mix of the talented and the original,
the raffish and the beautiful as you would on the King's
Road, Chelsea. Even amongst this stiff opposition, the
photographer Claude Virgin cut an unforgettable figure.
Virgin was born in 1928 in Atlanta, Georgia. He moved to New
York to work as a photographer, was hugely influenced by the
great art director of Harper's Bazaar Alexey Brodovitch, and
worked as an assistant for the terrific photographer Louis
Faurer. Then British Vogue brought him to London to give the
mostly fuddy-duddy fashion world some American snap.
"Claude arrived in London the same day as Helmut Newton,"
remembers Willie Landels, former Editor of Harpers & Queen:
They both went to dinner with the then Editor of Vogue,
Audrey Withers. She asked, "Mr Newton, what are you going to
do for us?"
"Uh. Take some pictures . . ."
She turned to Claude and said, "And you, Mr Virgin? What are
you going to do?"
"Oh," he said, "lots of brass! I'm going to put a lot of
brass on these girls. Make them look very brassy!"
He meant lots of jewels.
Actually there was very little brassiness about Virgin's
work, which had a clean, elegant line, an instinctual sense
of composition, and in which the models seemed frequently to
exhale a feline, "grown-up" femaleness. As Newton wrote in
his memoirs, "His photographs were sexy and different from
anything seen before in England."
Soon Virgin had become one of the hardest-working
photographers at British Vogue and had picked up a
reputation for creative exuberance. For instance, while he
was shooting the Paris collections, he told the
editor-on-the-spot that one of the fur coats was too long.
That was just the way it was, he was told. Was not. He
scissored a foot off the bottom.
Michelangelo Antonioni must have heard such stories because
when he arrived in London to begin work on Blow-Up (1966),
Virgin was, I think, the first photographer he visited. But
he settled on David Bailey as the template for the character
played by David Hemmings. Things were changing. According to
British Vogue, Virgin's work was "suddenly outmoded by
homegrown photographers like David Bailey and Brian Duffy".
There is truth to that. But not the whole truth.
I met Claude Virgin in the Bistro, a restaurant off Sloane
Square, run by a warm-hearted tyrant, Elisabeth Furse, my
mother. Virgin was an habitué. We became friendly and
together took over a sprawling double studio behind the
Pheasantry on the King's Road. It goes without saying that a
photographer's fashion and beauty studio was not a horrible
place for a young man - I was down from Cambridge - to be.
And Claude Virgin was its most entertaining element.
Virgin was addicted to certain forms of Britishry - he
joined a club on St James's, he drove an Aston Martin and he
would always work wearing a shirt, a tie and one of several
well-broken-in Savile Row suits - but he was also a hardcore
Modernist. The studio seating consisted mostly of Mies van
de Rohe "Barcelona" chairs. The art included a supposed
Rothko and Virgin's portrait, painted by a friend, Donald
Cammell, but the principal wall adornment was a huge wooden
aeroplane propeller.
It was the early Sixties. Virgin was no longer the hot Vogue
photographer but had plenty of work, both in fashion and
advertising, and could be as quirky as ever. Landels
remembers a shoot for Queen. "There was this hat," he says:
"He thought it was very dull. So he tore off the leg of his
pyjamas. They were striped pyjamas. And put the leg of the
pyjama around the hat and made it look terribly glamorous.
Not all the inspirations came off. There was the legendary,
perhaps apocryphal, cover shot of a veiled bride. Only when
the magazines had been printed did somebody spot that the
veil looked a bit, um, black. The issue was not, apparently,
a hot seller.
Virgin was close to many women, including some former
models, but he had a longstanding girlfriend and was in no
sense a womaniser. Indeed, he could be rather a disapproving
neighbour. I returned to the Pheasantry one afternoon to
find that an interior wall had sprouted between our studios.
Relations warmed up again. An openable door appeared in the
wall.
We worked together on projects from time to time. He took a
suite of photographs of the vivacious actress Sue Lloyd for
the magazine Town in which I was a foil. He took it into his
head to use me for a beer marketing campaign, kitted me up
in a bowler hat and blasted away on tests, spewing out many
dozen rolls in as many minutes. To my unspeakable relief,
the campaign was killed. This had nothing to do with the
pictures, which were pure Virgin, sharp and clear. The
drawback, I fear, was the model.
Virgin did indeed secede from photography, but it was
nothing to do with distaste for the work of Bailey, Duffy
and Terry Donovan, which he admired. It was more that he
represented the neo-classic aesthetic of the Chelsea Set.
The emergent Swinging London seemed a foreign land, not the
country to which he had moved, and he had no desire to take
pictures of its raffish, romantic inhabitants.
His attempt to frame another life for himself was in its way
magnificent. He was always liable to enthusiasms. One of his
closer friends, who worked in the City, persuaded him that
copper was the Next Big Thing. Virgin installed a
ticker-tape machine in his bedroom and I would listen, awed,
to his misadventures in the copper trade. The results were
both comic and tragic, but mostly the latter. He lost six
figures.
Claude Virgin's post-photography years were pleasant enough.
In 1969 he married, as his second wife, Jillie Bateman. They
put two sons, James and Henry, through Harrow. The marriage
endured until 1986. James is a fund-raiser for Harrow. Henry
writes, paints and plans to import green tea from China.
Claude developed other enthusiasms, genealogy (his own)
being one.
He never changed his mind about his reasons for giving up
full-time photography. In perhaps our last conversation, a
few months ago, he gleefully recalled a conversation with
the glamorous hipster-aristo Nico, Marchioness of
Londonderry. "I said, Nico, why are you wasting your time
with those silly pop people?" he said. That would be Mick
Jagger, whom his friend Donald Cammell was in 1970 to
co-direct in Performance.
As with several photographers of the Fifties, Sixties and
Seventies, including indeed his sometime boss Louis Faurer,
Virgin's work has not yet come into its own. It will. Count
on that.
Claude Ambrose Virgin, photographer: born Atlanta, Georgia 8
June 1928; married 1951 Margaret Barch (one daughter;
marriage dissolved), 1969 Jillie Bateman (two sons; marriage
dissolved 1986); died London 1 December 2006.