Bignell in colour

I’ve been thinking about doing a new Bignell post recently, but what decided me was a chance meeting last Saturday which ended up with me standing inside “The Manse” as Bignell referred to the house in the Moravian church yard (the former home of the designers Mary and Ernest Gillick) which was his last address. I only met Bignell once, in passing, and recall him as a tall man, who would have been close to the ceiling in the living room where I stood. It is possible that this picture, which has a sticker with the Manse address on the back was taken there.

 

 

The picture (Morning Reflections) was in the RPI international print exhibition in 1991.

There’s no actual theme to this post apart from the colour, and than the hope that these pictures are new to you. For most of his career Bignell took pictures in black and white and only used colour when necessary. Like here:

 

 

What better subject than a rainbow? Or perhaps below.

 

 

The picture is actually entitled Chelsea Sunset.

Below, the photographer’s equivalent of a still life, entitled Fallen Tulip.

 

 

From a minimalist view of a flower to a luxuriant view of vegetation.

 

 

And below, a frog.

 

 

These nature pictures might be the professional photographer’s version of holiday snaps. It seems to me that Bignell regarded his main body of work in black and white as the main expression of his skill as a photographer, and his main subject as people. Colour and nature were a kind of a vacation from his day job.

Most of these pictures are comparatively late work, taken in the 1970s and afterwards, so I guess they were also his way of relaxing after years of work in the city streets and in various studios.

 

 

Almost all his colour pictures are landscapes of some kind, like this shoreline.

 

 

Beach scenes, boats:

 

 

And features on the beach.

 

 

I had to crop those last two to scan them, hopefully not ruining the composition in the process.

The picture below seems to relate to his Wimbledon series although the body of water looks bigger.

 

 

In any case, the picture of a group of people fishing is equally tranquil.

Below, this creased print is of an unknown urban location.

 

 

Is it even in the UK?

This one certainly is, Battersea Park 1960.

 

 

I scanned most of these images this week, searching through the new Bignell drawers for colour pictures once that theme emerged. I found some nice black and white pictures too, which we’ll come back to later. I also looked on our server and found this picture, one of three which must have been part of a session I’ve looked at before. These were kept separately. Perhaps they were rejects, or out takes, as they are the only ones taken in the evening. You can look at the day time pictures in the post Bignell and the Goddess (link below). Bignell was in Turkey for that series.

 

 

I never gave the name of the woman as I wanted to concentrate on the pictures. I could tell you now, but do you really want to know? (Don’t worry, it’s not a particularly big deal.0

It occurs to me now that this image  of a woman in white robes, links us to next week’s post, which will be the latest in an annual series.So a good point to stop.

Anyway, this week’s low key post is also a response to the mini-summer we’ve had this week. I should add that by visit to Bignell’s old house was facilitated by Ian Foster who has a pop-up exhibition featuring photographs of the King’s Road in the 1960s in a nearby shop front, the former Carphone Warhouse. It’s worth a visit if you’re in the neighbourhood.

Finally, it occurs to me that there are quite a few Bignell posts, which I hope have helped to bring his work to a wider public. And here they are:

 

John Bignell and the celebrities (2012)

That’s entertainment: Bignell at the Palace (2012)

Bignell’s world (2013)

Bignell and the Goddess (2013)

Portrait of the artist as a young dude (2013)

Bignell meets Hedderly (2013)

Bignell at the pub (2014)

Bignell’s people (2014)

Christmas Days: a little bit of Bignell (2014)

Bignell and women: models, friends and strangers (2015)

Sarah Raphael: a session with Bignell (2015)

Bignell at work (2016)

Christmas Days:Bignell – a childhood in the 50s (2016)

Bignell’s world of the strange: an anthology (2016)

Bignell in Wimbledon: sunny days (2017)

Water: Bignell’s travels (2017)

Bignell’s travels: back streets and backwaters (2017)

I think that’s all of them. Bignell pictures also pop up inside other posts . You can’t read this blog without coming across them, and no doubt there will be more.

Thanks to John Bignell and his family for all the pleasure his work has given us.

 

 

Bignell’s travels: back streets and backwaters

We’re back with some more of John Bignell’s pictures from a box he labelled “rural London”. Some of them are not all that rural as we will see but some of them fit that description exactly:

 

Wanstead Flats according to Bignell’s writing on the back, about as rural as you get, and very far from Bignell’s usual subject matter. I’m dating it at about…..

Bignell strayed an even greater distance from London on some occasions. This is from a box marked “Stansted”.

A distinctly rural view with a country lane and a modest church. On the back of the print it says Chickney so the church may be St Mary’s. The village is a few mile away from the airport in Essex.

This is from the same set, a colour picture of Thaxted, only 20 minutes or so by bus away from the same airport. Bignell may have been here as the first stirrings of protest against London’s third airport were beginning. (Or not. I confess to a lack of knowledge of airport history). The parish church at any rate has an impressive spire.

 

This grand house was in the same general area but Bignell wrote nothing on the back. Can any Essex experts help?

 

He liked the view so much he tried a black and white version.

 

The next two pictures are also way off Bignell’s usual patch  but still in London, in Leytonstone Village.

 

 

A luxuriant garden and an overgrown lane. The woman sits just inside for a better view of whatever goes by. Below,perhaps nearby a slightly more urban street in the same area. The chimney cleaner’s wife enters her house perhaps smiling at Bignell while an elegant young woman walks by.

 

I think Bignell was a city boy at heart. There are quite a few urban pictures in the box.

Some of them are related to pictures we’ve seen before like this playground in Clapham

We saw those girls here, playing balls games, while that running boy tires himself out.

The church, once you can see it clearly is Holy Trinity, Clapham Common, not as I originally thought.

Others are content to walk, as in these pictures of Ebury Mews West in the Pimlico area. This group walk or ride for work.

 

 

While this man in a suit strolls along, hands in pockets,  minding his own business.

 

I featured one of these atmospheric pictures in the post called Bignell’s world of the strange. But it’s worth looking at the whole series.

They depict an odd little enclave off a side street in Westminster, Carlton Mews, shadowed and lonely.

 

Do you dare enter?

 

 

“No thoroughfare”

 

 

“Turning prohibited.” There seems to be a way up to an elevated section, a little street above the mews area, a little dilapidated.

 

 

With a solitary figure walking by. As i noted before it would be a suitable setting for a supernatural story to begin. ” I went toa rotting mews in an old part of London where a book dealer claimed to have a copy of……”

 

Let’s not go there, it’s not Halloween.

After that gloomy spot we’re better off outside, somewhere like leafy Dulwich.

Behind a wall a pleasant old house basking in sunlight.

Postscript

Like those pictures of Wimbledon, this week’s pictures simply show Bignell on the move, capturing moments in little corners of London. It’s something we all try to do from time to time, with mixed results, especially in these digital days when you can just point and shoot. Bignell needed to do most of the composition before he took the picture, so he got it right more often than an amateur would. But photography is a democratic art form and we all score a few goals by pressing the button at the right moment. Controlling the moment is the thing.

Postscript to the postscript

I’ve had more information on the Leytonstone Village pictures identifying the pub as the North Star, still a going concern. Further information on the area in this conservation area document:

Click to access conservation-area-browning-road.pdf

Water: Bignell’s travels

I seem to have Bignell on my mind at the moment. I assembled a set of pictures for a recent post mostly taken in Wimbledon which I thought were very pleasant and evocative and I didn’t realise they were part of a larger group of pictures. Someone has been doing some Bignell related research at the library and I went looking for negatives only to find that some of the stacks of yellow photograph boxes contained prints, among which was a set Bignell called “Rural London”. He had evidently roamed around looking for parts of London which looked like the countryside, mostly in west London but occasionally going as far as Leytonstone and Wanstead. Actually I think he got sidetracked a bit because some of the pictures look decidedly urban to me. I decided to start by looking at the views featuring the river, or streams and ponds, because I like waterscapes .(See this post).

Some of them link up with some of the individual pictures I’ve used on the blog. Like this one:

I think we saw some of these boys before, playing about on the river, where the houseboats are moored west of Battersea Bridge.

If you look at the south shore you can just see St Mary’s Church. The thing I always remember about it is that William Blake married Catherine Boucher here in 1782.

 

Here it is at high tide one of the few surviving buildings from this era. A slightly different view below shows all the giant lettering on the Silver Bell Flour Mill. You can see another view of the church and the former surrounding buildings in this Bernard Selwyn post.

If we follow the path further along along the south side of the Thames you come here, another industrial stretch of building at Mortlake gives way to a tree covered path, now part of the Thames Walk.

The path as I recall it from walking part of the Thames Path when my son was younger gets quite narrow as you make your way to Kew.

Let’s take a watery detour south back to the Wimbledon of that recent post. I feel we’ve seen some of these people before.

Engaged in that traditional pastime of messing about at the edge of a body of water on a warm summer day.

In this picture the mother of some of the party attempts to move them for a pleasant stroll, although not everyone is convince that’s a good idea.

In any case for a casual picture Bignell has produced a marvelously evocative picture of that lazy summer day.

While I’m on the subject of detours a quick verbal sidetrack into the question of dating. I said in the Wimbledon post that the pictures were taken in 1970 while Bignell was living in Tedworth Square (he lived there roughly from 1963-1975). Most of the pictures are stamped on the back with that address. But some of them are also stamped with his previous address in Trafalgar Studios in Manresa Road. (He was there until 1962. The purpose built artists’ studios Trafalgar Studios and Wentworth Studios were demolished in the 1960s). So we have quite a long span for the possible dates of these pictures from 1958 to 1975. Some of them look to be on the early side of that, judging by the clothes or the hairstyles. For others it’s difficult to tell.

Barnes Bridge, with a pleasure cruiser, another timeless scene. From this point there are a lot of pleasure craft on the river.

Like here at Richmond.

And here with that other traditional feature, a ferry.

In the next two pictures the hairstyles provide a clue to the date.

Surely the reason why he took two pictures. The woman and the girl  both have striking holiday hairdos.

Any hair experts who could put a date to the picture would be very welcome.

Let’s leave the riverside suburbs for now and get back to what I think is the Serpentine on another summer day.

I’ll come back again to Bignell’s travels on another occasion. If anyone has any thoughts on dates or locations please leave a comment.

Postscript

The post I was going to write this week is not quite ready as I’m getting some informed input so forgive me for returning to Bignell so soon. However I’m sure you’ve found these pictures interesting as I have, and the post did prompt me to doing some research on Bignell’s various addresses which was long overdue.

Bignell in Wimbledon: sunny days

In my last post about John Bignell I tried to make the argument that he was much more than a working photographer and that we should take him seriously as an artist. Now I may be undermining my own argument by presenting a set of photographs which at one level are just quick snapshots of what he might have seen on a day out, like you or I might. I came across these pictures while trawling through the Bignell collection for “strange” photos but found myself charmed by these pictures of an ordinary summer day.

These pictures taken on or near Wimbledon Common were taken about 1970, a comparatively idyllic period in London life after the tumult of the 1960s and before the complications of the 1970s. I was 15 then and I would have enjoyed walking on the Common on a summer day. Many years later I used to like walking across Putney Heath and Wimbledon Common to Wimbledon village and getting the bus back to Putney. It’s a part of London that makes me feel calm and relaxed. Above is the famous windmill.

I don’t know who this family is, or whether Bignell knew them. Something about the casual nature of the pictures make me think he did. The dog of course is perfectly placed for the composition, which Bignell can’t have arranged.

Bignell is particularly good at photographing children. In this period it was still possible to wander around with a camera and take pictures of children playing.

In trees,

Or by water.

Bodies of water of course are particular attractive when you’re 9 or 10 or 11. (Remember that scary public information film about its dangers?)

Wading through shallow water

Poking around from a distance, with soem help from your parents

Taking a few minor risks

And getting a bit of help from the grown up kids.

There were not quite enough pictures here for a full post, but rather than do a short one I’m adding a few related pictures.

This is Putney Heath, a little further north than Wimbledon

I think this is the cricket pitch. It’s another special spot on a sunny day.

This picture is back in Chelsea at the St Luke’s playground in Sydney Street in 1975  when it was rather more unstructured than it is today.

A vintage piece of playground equipment from the same day.

And another view of some play with balls. Many girls from the 70s will recall games of two balls. I’m not sure of the date of this one

 

So, John Bignell then. Not just an artist but a master of the commonplace and capturing the moment.

Postscript

Perhaps a bit of an inconsequential post this week, but  I wrote four posts in one week when I was preparing to go to my mother’s funeral. It was pretty cold that day, and now we come to publishing the post it’s pretty cold again with more of the same promised. So this is a good time to remember sunny days from past decades when some of us were younger and as close to carefree as you can get after childhood.

Postscript to the postscript – from the department of Corrections

I’ve been delving deeper into the Bignell collection recently looking for some specific negatives but along the way I came across a box of pictures I hadn’t seen before which contained other pictures from the same sessions as the ones in this post. So it is now clear that the final picture is not of St Luke’s playground but features a playground next to a church in Clapham. When you look closer this is pretty obvious. Oops. (Substitute a stronger expletive if you wish.)

On the plus side, we now have a set of pictures which Bignell kept together under the theme of “rural London” some of which you can expect to see soon.

 

Bignell’s world of the strange – an anthology

John Bignell was a jobbing photographer for most of his working life and took photographic assignments wherever they took him, from the banks of the Thames to ancient Greek cities. Or just round and about in Chelsea. I once had to look for something in the Chelsea News and went through an entire bound volume of a year’s weekly papers and found at least one photo by him in almost every issue. He covered news stories, did catalogue shoots and took portraits. He did what used to be euphemistically called “glamour” work (although some of the pictures in this genre look a bit odd, rather than erotic,by modern standards ) and documented burlesque shows at the Chelsea Place and elsewhere. And sometimes, when the mood took him he took pictures which now look like some kind of 1950s idea of illustrations to 21st century urban fantasies. I’ve featured some of these before as lone items but I’ve wanted to collect them together along with some more of his “strange” pictures. So some of these images will be familiar to regular readers and some won’t. But all of them are in some way weird or eccentric.

I realise that I am imposing something of my own love of the uncanny or the Fortean onto these images. But go with me. These two,for example,look they belong in an adaptation of a Neal Gaiman story. If Neal Gaiman had lived in the 1950s that is.

“Virtue fights back”, 1955. I used this in December 2014, and made the connections with Gaiman’s book / TV series Neverwhere and Christopher Fowler’s novel about another London Above, Roofworld. This could be the same duo.

“Satan triumphant” 1958.

Actually I think the models are the same, Desiree and Pierre, from the Chelsea Palace. Here they are on stage as “apache” dancers, a favourite cabaret theme of the time.

 

This picture was also part of a stage show, continuing the “claws” theme.

Never mind the knife, Madam. pick up the ray gun!

Bignell had started playing with strange scenarios as far back as 1949, in these two pictures, illustrating Cinderella, in a King’s Road antique shop called Horace Walpole.

The two ugly sisters are represented by dummies with the stuffed heads of deer.

Seedy and sinister like something out of a fantasy by Powell and Pressberger, which leads us to the next image.

This picture from 1958 was entitled “Probably the most widely seen eye in the world.” The eye belonged to the Mayor of Chelsea’s mace bearer and featured in posters and publicity for Michael Powell’s ill-fated film Peeping Tom, which more or less ended his UK career.

On the back of one print of the picture Bignell has written a reference to Susan Sontag’s book “On Photography”, even noting the page number in the Penguin edition of the mention of Peeping Tom. There’s nothing particularly illuminating there but perhaps Bignell wanted to remind anyone who read the caption that someone thought the film was a serious piece of work. There seems to have been a lot of moral panic about it when it first came out, which seems almost inexplicable in the light of what we’ve seen since. Following Bignell’s lead I refer you to David Pirie’s “A new heritage of horror: the English Gothic cinema” for an account of the film and its reception.

Continuing the gothic theme is this atmospheric picture of a respectable looking man alone in a dark alley, actually Carlton Mews, near Trafalgar Square.

He looks a little like a character in an M R James or Algernon Blackwood story on his way to a supernatural rendezvous.

Less morbid is this picture,  of an ecstatic dancer named Lyn, in a Margaret Morris style pose on a beach at Foulness in 1956. Bignell entitled it Lyn-a- leaping

Next a picture from 1955 (or possibly 1956) that is wrong on many levels.

It was entitled “Ancestor worship”, to add more misconception to the wrongness of a Frenchman in a gorilla suit holding a juvenile chimpanzee. (Yes, it was Pierre again.) What did they imagine the young ape was thinking? He can’t have been fooled for a second, so perhaps he thought it was just another of the inexplicable things the humans did from time to time. This was at Chessington Zoo, a perfectly reputable establishment where they probably still had chimpanzee tea parties in the 1950s and other anthropomorphic entertainments, so some of the apes would have been used to close contact with people.

Bignell couldn’t resist another photo of the “Chessington gorilla”. Here he is with his partner Desiree again.

Although this is also a strange picture it will offend no hairy humanoids, and might interest human or non-human lovers of wacky cars. These so called bubble cars used to be seen around the place in the 50s and 60s. Motoring experts will correct me if my identification is wrong but I think it’s a Heinkel. (Interestingly there was another variety of bubble car made by Messerschmitt – what prompted aircraft manufacturers to make tiny cars?)

The last picture is simply a salute from the master of the revels, Bignell himself, with his eye on the camera, and the viewer.

For the record, and I know a few of you will wonder, they’re at the Lord Nelson (later the Trafalgar) in the King’s Road. There are two dates on the picture, 1968 and 1954. The earlier one seems more likely but you never know in Bignell’s world of the strange.

The trouble with Bignell

The trouble with the work of John Bignell and writing about it is that for most of his career he was, as I said in the first sentence, a working photographer going where the work took him, and fitting in the more personal / artistic work when he could. For most of his career he doesn’t seem to have concerned himself too much with his place in the history of photography. When he eventually did a book it was called John Bignell: Chelsea Photographer. It’s a good book but it established him as an observer of Chelsea/ London life. That’s not a bad thing in itself but I think he was so much more than that, as photos like the one in this post and others show.

I’m going to carry on writing about him and posting photographs by him. One of these days perhaps the wider world will recognize him as a great original.

Postscript

One of the many great qualities of the Bignelll collection is that you’re always finding surprises, or variations on photographs you thought you knew, a different print or an unexpectedly informative caption in Bignell’s hand. As often happens while trawling through the collection for this post I came across further ideas for new posts. There could have been more on childhood in the 50s for example. There’s probably a possible post about Wimbledon Common too or more on Bignell’s models. To spare your sensitivities I’ve never done a post on his glamour work but that too is aesthetically interesting . Strictly speaking the nude and the sundial (featured here) should be in this anthology  as it has a few mystical connotations, with a second picture from the same session but to keep this post safe for work we’ll keep that one back for now. We’re used to thinking of the 1950s as a staid, conventional era, but there was plenty of strangeness bubbling up under the plain clothing.

Christmas Days : Bignell – a childhood in the 50s

I often turn to Bignell at short notice when I’m not sure what’s coming next on the blog. There are so many striking images in our collection that even a random selection works. I’ve been working on a full length post with a particular theme, looking through the collection for suitable pictures but scanning any that appealed to me. In the course of this I came across enough images for one of these short posts. Most of these pictures come from the 1950s when Bignell was first making a name for himself, and they all feature children.

If you’re not familiar with Chelsea Bridge you might think they were doing something dangerous, but they’re not. The parapet is pretty wide at this point.  The picture is dated 1954. Battersea Power Station, in the background is still under construction. (It was built in two phases, one in the 1930s and one after the war. Here Station B is still awaiting the completion of one of its chimneys.)

The boys in this picture are in mild peril of falling off. I admire them for the sheer silliness of what they’re doing.

The dog is clearly amused. This is 1956, and another of Chelsea’s bridges, Battersea.

Speaking of Battersea, what about the Festival Gardens in 1954, a remnant of the Festival of Britain which lingered on for many years although I think this feature had gone by the first time I went to Battersea Park.

A quiet spot for mothers to take young children, with the possibility of water- based play for older ones. There was a paddling pool not far from this spot but on this particular day you could get your feet a little bit wet if you fancied that. No danger.

The duo below are doing nothing risky either , in 1959.

Although they’re clearly starving.

In another part of Chelsea in the same year, a more decorous pastime.

The girls are having to dance with each other at Victor Silvester’s Dance Studio at the Gaumont Cinema, in the King’s Road. This is the rock’n’roll era, so are they jiving? (I’m no dance expert)

I recently attended the premiere (at the gate Cinema) of a film called Two Potato, an exploration of urban play made by pupils at Colville School in conjunction with Digital Works, a regular partner of the Local Studies library. You can  see it here:

http://www.onepotato.org.uk/film.html

(Full disclosure: I’m among the people who get thanked in the credits.) There’s usually a Q and A after the film in which someone asks the film makers if they would rather have lived in the days depicted in photos by Bignell and others, when kids apparently wandered the streets looking for odd things to do, as in today’s pictures. Rather than the screen dominated lives of modern children. I always like it when someone says no. I enjoyed my 1960s childhood, which did involve a certain amount of wandering around unaccompanied by adults, but in my opinion there’s nothing wrong with modern childhood. There’s more Lego for one thing.

 

Monkeys

Today’s monkeys in the archives are working on a private project.

Quentin and Vinnie are doing the searching while Steve keeps a look out.

See you tomorrow.

 

Bignell at work

I’ve been having trouble with the post I was going to do this week. I had the pictures I wanted to use but I couldn’t find the right way to write about them. I came into work on a Saturday and while I was waiting for the computer to finish the things it likes to do when I log in the cursor alighted on a folder of pictures by John Bignell, a not quite random selection of images which showed people doing various forms of work. So almost immediately I decided not to force the other post into existence but to let Bignell take the reins. We haven’t had a Bignell post for a while so why ever not?

As always with Bignell he moves from the world of art and artists in which he had many friends to a more ordinary world of shops and street stalls where he appeared to be equally welcome. Here is the sculptor, Loris Rey at work in his studio in 1959.

We’re lucky to know the date of that picture. In others you have to infer from the picture itself when it might have been taken. In this case the late 1950s or early 1960s is as close as you can get.

An old school  milk float with a perky horse pulling milk, a man and a dog. You can imagine Bignell wandering the streets setting up pictures like that as he came across people he might have known, or struck up an acquaintance with, but on other occasions it looks like he was invited.

 

Everything looks clean and modern in this picture but it has an undeniably period feel to it. It’s sparse compared to a modern operating theatre.

Back on the streets, a rare colour picture taken in the old World’s End area.

 

Sea food al fresco. The St John’s Church Hall visible in the back ground and the green grocer’s stall we’ve seen before.

This is another street stall much further east along the King’s Road.

 

The three people posing for the picture look eminently recognizable (if anyone knows them?)

Not far away from that location, a flower stall.

Thank you Madam, says Bignell. The lady herself is clearly not quite sure what he’s doing, and why she’s in the picture.

Bignell also went into shops. Here a grocer slices meat.

And Loris Rey works on something else.

Here is a shop which is possibly devoted to Japanese goods, complete with a kimono-clad member of staff.

Bignell was forever popping into art shops and small galleries.

Framing work done here. Half a notice on the subject is visible in the door.

Art supplies available here. The picture below may be at Green and Stone, the long established shop on the King’s Road.

Bignell was in  butchers.

And fish shops

A 1970s look to that picture – the woman’s hair (and the guy with his back to us whose hair is getting good in the back as Frank Zappa used to say). And see the slogan – “Go to work on an egg”.

More hair in this picture where Bignell looks in a a barbers (“well groomed hair”).

And a classy looking florists.

The Pottery. Anyone remember that one?

Bignell even looked at used car lots. This one was where the new fire station on the corner of Dovehouse Street was built.

Finally, some actors at work.

I wonder what she made of it all?

 

Postscript

I know sometimes a Bignell post can seem like a random selection, but there’s always something interesting there, even in the most throwaway  sort of pictures.

Note the little figure of the girl in leg braces, a charity coin box, in the background. Those used to be everywhere. The two women are crossing to the south side of the King’s Road possibly near Glebe Place (E A Fownes is now My Old Dutch).

Have fun identifying some of these locations.

Next week there will be another guest blogger for Halloween so I make no guarantee about factual accuracy.

The Times of Chelsea – magic, mystics, motoring and maxis

The Times of Chelsea was a small magazine which ran from 1973-1975. It contained a mixture of Chelsea subject matter – news stories to do with planning or conservation, features on local residents, pieces about local history and what you might call general interest – motoring, restaurants and fashion. The photographer John Bignell was the picture editor, so it was also full of his work. (That alone makes it useful for local history – Bignell didn’t always label his pictures and the Times can sometimes help with that.)

You might find an interview with the then still famous best selling author Dennis Wheatley:

Wheatley issues his normal warning about the dangers of black magic in this piece, while at the same time impressionable young persons like myself were reading his supernatural novels, not to mention many far more subversive works such as Richard Cavendish’s the Black Arts and the famous partwork Man, Myth and Magic. Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast (who Wheatley may have had in mind for Mocata, the villain in “The Devil rides out”) was another Chelsea resident, like Hester Marsden-Smedley, the wife of the Mayor of Chelsea who wrote many articles for the Times on local history and reported in one that she found Crowley “fascinating but not frightening“. (She found another local resident far more repellent in a piece remembering William Joyce’s short period of membership of the local Conservative Party).

In the film of the Devil rides out, Mocata was played by Charles Gray (of Ennismore Gardens) profiled in the Times in an article called “Elegant baddie”, and photographed by Bignell.

Another brief resident was Colin Wilson, famous for the 1950s classic of new existentialism  the Outsider, but more importantly for me also the author of another blockbuster survey of the uncanny valley, “The Occult”. If you’ll allow to ramble off on a tangent I met him around this time in the Village Bookshop in Regent Street and he turned out to be friendly and tolerant towards a fanboy. (At the time I took it for granted that the shop had a large occult section – many bookshops did then, but I’ve since read that the owner was a bit of an aficionado of the subject, and actually sent the young Iain Sinclair on some psycho-geographical missions – told in the book length interview with Sinclair by Kevin Jackson, “The Verbals”)

Wilson was also a friend of another subject of an article in the Times of Chelsea, local artist Regis de Cachard (or Count Regis de Bouvier de Cachard de Montmeran, to give him his full name and title).

We’ve met him before of course. The article notes that  Wilson was intending to write a book about him. That would have been interesting. De Cachard, it says in the article, was currently concentrating on mythological subjects, and he announces his intention to paint 100 pictures on Old Testament themes, one a week for two years

There might be a motoring feature, like this one which also relates to a previous topic on the blog.

You also find some interesting photos, like this one under the headline “End of the Essoldo”.

 

As it happens we now know the Essoldo was not the last incarnation of this building as a cinema, but its time as the venue for the stage show of the Rocky Horror Show may have been the height of its fame. (Yes there’s an anecdote: a friend of my wife worked as an usherette during the show and got her a ticket, at the end of a row. My wife, a teenager at the time, watched the show in a state of apprehension that she might be pulled onto the stage by the fun-loving cast)

John Bignell provided some celebrity pictures like this one.

Ryan O’Neal, seen here admiring a pendant belonging to Lorenzo Berni, owner of “the Beauchamp Place rendezvous San Lorenzo”. He “does quite a lot of the cooking himself in between chatting to customers like Mick and Bianca Jagger…and Bill Gibb”

The mention of the designer Bill Gibb brings us to another of the frequent subjects for features in the Times, fashion, often connected to local shops. Chelsea in the early 70s would have been a key location for London fashion of course but the thing I noticed most is that the commonest clothing items being featured in the Times were kaftans, maxi-dresses and nightdresses. Like this one:

“Hand made in Yugoslavia” for Bianca Busaglia. They were everywhere. Now, I’ve looked at fashion in old photographs before as you know. (Sambourne, Hawarden etc). And I was living in London from 1973. I hadn’t remembered that this was the era of the maxi skirt and dress. But it was.

By my recollection, in this period fashions, especially in areas like hemlines ,were pretty much dictated by the big fashion designers who were followed by high street shops. This style dictatorship seemed to come to an end in the late 70s with punk, after which women started wearing pretty much what they wanted. (Okay, a bit of a generalisation I know, but broadly true, like the thing with the colour black – I can remember a time when black was only worn to funerals and you couldn’t buy a black car without a special order. After the 70s you couldn’t get away from black, and still can’t. )

But back to the Times. Is this a nightie?

No, it’s a maternity dress from a shop called In Pod, perfectly in tune with current styles. Check out the shoes by the way. Spot on for this period.

This one though…

That is a nightie, from a shop called Night Owls in the Fulham Road. (At number 50, next to where there was a branch of Gapp’s – see this post. It closed a few short years ago.). We’re glad it’s a nightie and not another maternity dress – she’s smoking, something people used to do back then.

There was also some publicity for the larger shops:

Modern readers will no doubt appreciate the prices of these items. Below, I don’t know if the smooth gentleman in the striped shirt is giving good customer service to the lady wearing some early boho chic, or if he’s another model working in the modern boutique Elle (of Sloane Square)

This is a whole page on a shop called Joseph, at 33 King’s Road. My wife had a raincoat like that.

In the interests of historical accuracy I went to the costume and fashion collection at Chelsea Library to look at copies of Vogue from 1973 to 1975, the Times of Chelsea years and yes, there were many pictures of much the same sort of outfits, some even more extravagant, and of course colourful. There was a kind of soft focus extravagance about this period exemplified by the fashions of the Biba shop which reached its peak in Kensington and Chelsea at the same time.

One more striking outfit:

Finally another mention of Chelsea Library in the Times. My old boss:

I hope she won’t mind this small tribute. (Nite: customers of Chelsea Library were eventually reconciled to the merger with Kensington. As a Chelsea resident I can see the advantages.)

The maxi has been back with us for some time. I saw many examples on the way home today. (A very warm Wednesday afternoon). Dennis Wheatley, Charles Gray, Colin Wilson, Regis de Cachard and the Ford Capri are unfortunately gone, though not forgotten. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for Patricai Meara (later Pratt).

Postscript

It was a bit of a ramble this week, but magazines are sometimes like that. I’m not deliberately intending to turn the postscript over to obituaries but I couldn’t help but note the passing of Richard Neville, the editor of another small magazine, the “underground” periodical, Oz. I was too young, and too far from London to be a regular reader, but the Oz obscenity trial was a sensation of the time and I do remember the controversy and the taking of sides. I was firmly behind the three editors, Neville, Felix Dennis (the  millionaire publisher and poet who died in 2014 ) and Jim Anderson. I remember reading a book by Tony Palmer, the Trials of Oz, which portrayed the trail as a knockabout yarn. I couldn’t wait to get to London.

 

 

Sarah Raphael – a session with Bignell

The name of Sarah Raphael was familiar to me before I first looked at this week’s photographs but I have to admit I didn’t know a great deal about her. I had some inkling that she had died comparatively young but I don’t know where that came from. To summarise: she was born in 1960 and became known as a painter of portraits, landscapes and abstract pictures. She was married with three children. She died in 2001 aged 41. The people who have written about her including Clive James, William Boyd and her father Frederic Raphael agree that she was a significant artist. Had she lived we would know a lot more about her.

And at some point she met John Bignell. I’ve scanned a couple of regular sized prints from our Bignell collection but also isolated a few more from a contact sheet as I did once before with Regis de Bouvier de Cachard. This gives us a record of one photo session with Bignell. I don’t know if this was one of Bignell’s magazine or newspaper assignments or if she was one of his artistic acquaintances. (There were quite a few of those.) But they are fascinating pictures of an artist .

There won’t be a lot of commentary from  me this week. Sometimes the pictures speak for themselves. Here she sits on a stool in an elegant room looking at one of her pictures.

There are some variants of this pose.

They seem to have tried out quite a few poses showing Ms Raphael at work, putting brush to canvas.

In her studio (or just a pleasantly untidy room nearby).

Using a mirror to create a picture within a picture effect.

Or using the mirrors (and some plates?) as props.

Taking a break.

If you’ve never encountered her work you can see in the photographs that the painting has a slightly surreal feel to it.

See how that tower in the painting has moved from right to left as Bignell set up the shots.

I found some similar images in her illustrations to a book by her father, “The Hidden I” (Thames and Hudson 1990) which demonstrate the same qualities.

Perhaps Bignell was trying to capture some of the same playfulness in his pictures of the artist.

She was also influences by pop art and comics.

[Strip Page 1 and Page 5]

And could work in the space between landscape and abstract art as in one of her Australian paintings.

[Gibber desert Constellation II]

But I promised as little commentary as possible, and no attempt at art criticism so let’s just remember a talented artist at work being photographed by a talented photographer.

Postscript

You can see more of Sarah Raphael’s work at http://www.clivejames.com/gallery/painting/sarah-raphael

As hinted at last week I’m doing what you might call quirky posts at the moment. I did consider trying to assemble some of Bignell’s odder images into a post called Weird Bignell but I’ve already used some of the best. I also looked through the run of a short lived 1970s periodical called the Times of Chelsea for which he was the picture editor and got a few ideas for later. I never did find the reason for this particular session, but I’m glad to have found the pictures and been to use them on the blog.

It’s possibly not of general interest but the total number of page views on the blog recently passed three quarters of a million. I was quite pleased anyway.

Finally, after the recent sad news of the death of Muhammed Ali, here he is in a couple of Bignell pictures.

The Greatest of all time.

Bignell and women – models, friends and strangers

Like many working photographers in his heyday, the 1950s and 1960s John Bignell took photographs of women as portraits, for newspapers, for fashion shoots, in street photography, in “art” photos, individual commissions and even what we now euphemistically call glamour photography.  For this post I’ve been looking through some of the lightly categorized boxes of prints we have (“London”, “unidentified people”, “identified people”) to try and find some of his less well known work. Some of these images are finished pieces of work, some look like he was just playing around. All of them I hope are intriguing in their own way or evocative of a particular time.

This is an example. Three young women, possibly models, getting ready for a fashion shoot or a show, which Bignell thought was worth printing.

This one is an outdoor shot.

I can’t quite place the background, but near a river, the woman possibly on a boat. Whover the lady is, it’s a good picture of her.

The contact sheet below has a recognizeable background.

The houseboats near Battersea Bridge, with the Battersea shore in the distance. I assume that Bignell was following her around taking pictures for a magazine pr newspaper article but I don’t know who she is. As with all these unknowns I hope someone who reads this post will have some ideas. If it’s someone you know or used to know it could be a pleasant surprise.

I do know this lady:

It’s Thea Holme, who wrote a history of Chelsea published in 1972. The book is now out of print but available through second hand dealers. I still consult it from time to time. Again, the contact prints look like they are going to accompany an article. Several show the writer “at work” writing or researching.

There are portraits in the boxes of prints with nothing on the back but a date or an enigmatic note.

This one just says 1955. A woman very much of that decade as the next one is not.

There is some quality of familiarity in some of these pictures which makes me think that Bignell was good at making his subjects relax. I feel that he knew them, so therefore I must know them, and their identities are just out of reach.

This is one out of a trio of pictures.

I’ve just called them “Woman hat grass”.

Bignell liked to work with props. Here’s another hat picture.

The same woman? The same hat definitely.

This is another kind of prop.

There are several shots of Irina Polkiakova, publicity pictures from 1957 for a burlesque performer. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post Bignell knew Paul Raymond, who put on burlesque shows at the Chelsea Palace and at his own Raymond Revue bar in Soho. Bignell has left us quite a few examples of his glamour work, although these are almost innocuous by modern standards.

Dorothy Insull in 1959. It’s interesting that Bignell has often noted the names of his models in this kind of work. Presumably he thought he would never need to remember the names of the women he knew socially. Some of the erotic pictures simply seem odd now – a nude woman sitting at a typewriter, a naked woman in a doorway picking up a milk bottle – some of them obviously tongue in cheek – a naked woman holding a slip or a nightdress in one hand, a box of the washing powder Omo (older readers may remember this product) in the other, with the caption “brighter than white” on the back. I’ve refrained from posting those last three because we’re no longer so casual about these matters, or as innocent as people were in Bignell’s time. However, I will show you one of his arty nudes. Look away now if easily offended.

That one might also fit into a set of weird/esoteric Bignell images.

As might the last two images, of a woman Bignell hasn’t named but I feel we should know.

My colleague Tim has pointed out that the woman looks like one or both of the women in the painting. Could this be a photograph of an artist’s model and the painting of her? In the second image she adopts a model’s pose.

Possibly the pose of the male figure in the background. Is he another picture of her?

Surely someone knows who she is? I’ll leave that one with you. I’ll just note as I have before that Bignell hasn’t made it easy for us in terms of date, names and places. Fortunately the pictures themselves are always worth examination.

Postscript

I was preoccupied with medical matters again this week so  I returned to Bignell who can always be relied upon to provide images which don’t need a great deal of commentary.

Postscript to the Postscript

The comment from London Remembers below points out that the woman and sundial picture is reversed which I hadn’t noticed. I tried flipping it and thought it looked better that way. But why?

Any thoughts on the location?

Postscript to the postscript to the postscript (Feb 2017)

A researcher has been looking at some of Bignell’s pictures and as a result I can now say that the woman with the sundial was called Gerda Ronn.  Bignell took many pictures of her including one in which she is fully clothed. The sundial picture probably dates from 1954. Quite a different era in terms of attitudes to outdoor nudity.