Parkinson Photographs, 1935-1990

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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 earned throughout Europe and across the Atlantic. This retrospective of his work, edited and with a text 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 varied beginning in the Modernist movement of the 1930w, he broke new ground in fashion photography with the images of spontaneous movement for @Harper's Bazaar'. In 1939, he moved to '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 photographs 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 Batley, Avedon or Newton. He continued to work for 'Vogue' until 1978, when a move to 'Town & Country' in the US heralded a renaissance of his career. That, and his acclaimed portraits of well-known figures, including the Royal Family, further boosted his international reputation.This book does not attempt a comprehensive coverage. By selecting photographs of individual distinction and excellence, some well-known but many unfamiliar, it aims to place his work at each period within a contemporary historical and photographic context. Martin Harrison worked with Norman Parkinson and many of his contemporaries in the 1960s and has drawn on the extensive archives of his work to produce this new critical assessment.