David Bailey in conversation with Andrew Graham-Dixon
April 4, 2011 Leave a comment
The profane photographer on stars, snobbery, sculpture and why he couldn’t give a monkey’s about posterity.
I’d been warned. David Bailey has a reputation as a “difficult” interviewee: touchy, hectoring, foul-mouthed, with an inveterate tendency to ignore questions and talk about whatever is at the forefront of his own mind instead. Foul-mouthed he was, but as for the rest he most certainly did not live up to stereotype.
Maybe we caught him on a good day but he was thoroughly charming, giving the impression of a man who has ceased to care what posterity might think of him – if he ever did care – and who is now sufficiently successful to pursue his own enthusiasms: creating sculptures, photographing the last bullfighters, doing charity work in Afghanistan.
Surrounded by his army of assistants, and speaking in the large, light-filled studio just off the Gray’s Inn Road where he has worked “for donkey’s years”, Bailey, now 74, even agreed to talk – mostly, anyway – about what we wanted him to talk about…
Read the rest of the interview in the culture section of the Telegraph on Sunday (04 Apr 2011).
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