Terry O'Neill

Terry O'Neill is this week releasing a book of fifty years of his photography, only including people he liked. He started out as a jazz drummer in London in the sixties, was mates with the Beatles and Stones, so found it easy to begin taking photos of  stars for newspapers, he then moved to L.A. later in the decade, working on film sets as the celebrity photographer. He knew how to deal with egos, he reckoned, because he was used to being in the background as a drummer! His favourite subject was Jean 'The Shrimp' Shrimpton. To date he has had three retrospective exhibitions in London.

Looking through a large number of his photos, the single portraits are mainly too posed  for my personal taste, mainly front on, full on, often almost belligerent - I prefer those of groups or pairs of people, where they have someone else to play off against and possibly feel more at ease with. These include a number of surprising combinations - at least to me - Bowie and Liz Taylor; Sean Connery and Bardot; Lichfield and Britt Ekland; Bowie and the standing dog for the Diamond Dogs album cover; Paul Newman and Clint Eastwood, or Lee Marvin in another.  Seemingly even more relaxed are the scenes, possibly engineered, of  stars eating and reading papers - perhaps early in the morning before the subject can put on their persona! Also those of performers appear oddly more natural, even when the shot is of a flamboyant pose on stage from Elton John. He and Sinatra, another favourite, are doing what comes naturally to them, after all. Most of the Elton shots come from the 2008 book Eltonography.  On the whole O'Neill appears more at home with the music stars, presumably because they were friends: the Stones, the Beatles, The Who. It's in their portraits that O'Neill does what he is renowned for - capturing candid shots in unusual and unexpected settings.