Norman Parkinson

by Martin Harrison

For more than fifty years, Norman Parkinson was one of Britain's leading exponents of fashion and portrait photography, as well as one of very few British photographers whose reputation carried throughout Europe and across the Atlantic. This retrospective of his work, edited and with a text written by Martin Harrison and published with the full cooperation of Norman Parkinson's estate, is the first serious attempt to reappraise his contribution to twentieth-century culture.
Parkinson's career was beginning in the Modernist movement of the 1930s, he broke new ground in fashion photography with his images of spontaneous movement for Harper's Bazaar. In 1939, he moved to British Vogue and documented the war years from his farm in the English countryside. His first stay in New York in 1949 signalled the beginning of his international travels and an increasingly cosmopolitan style of photography in the 1950s. When the mood changed in the early 1960s Parkinson was approaching fifty years of age and his exuberant and highly individual response to the London scene for Queen presents a markedly different view from that of Bailey, Avedon or Newton. He continued to work for Vogue until 1976, when a move to Town & Country in New York heralded a renaissance of his career. That, and his acclaimed portraits of well-known figures, including the Royal Family, further boosted his international reputation.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published September 15, 1994

About the author

Martin Harrison is a British art historian, curator, and author, internationally recognized for his expertise in photography, stained glass, and the work of painter Francis Bacon. Beginning his career in the 1960s as a photographer’s assistant at Vogue, Harrison later emerged as a leading authority on British photojournalism with his influential book Young Meteors: British Photojournalism, 1957–1965. He played a key role in reviving interest in forgotten photographers, including Lillian Bassman and Saul Leiter.
Harrison’s curatorial work spans major institutions such as the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, with exhibitions held across Europe, the United States, and Mexico. A founding trustee of the English Stained Glass Museum at Ely Cathedral, he also contributed significantly to the study of Victorian stained glass and Pre-Raphaelite art.
His most celebrated contribution lies in his extensive scholarship on Francis Bacon. Since 1999, Harrison has authored several critical texts on the artist’s work and its sources, culminating in the five-volume Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné (2016), a landmark in Bacon studies. He continues to lead academic discourse as editor of the Francis Bacon Studies series, focusing on the artist’s intellectual and visual influences, particularly cinema and photography.
Across a multifaceted career, Harrison has combined visual analysis with rigorous scholarship, leaving a lasting impact on the study of modern art and visual culture.

Reviews

[Rhode PVD · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not an expert on this topic, and got this huge oversized coffee table book at a sale. It's gorgeous. It's fun. The photos are evocative of a time when women wore underwear that squished them into improbable shapes (wasp waists, cone breasts) and hair was much more formal and coiffed than it is now.