Terence Donovan: The 1960s

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Judy Dent, Beauty Feature for the Sunday Times, 25 April 1960. Terence Donovan

The exhibition includes portraits of Julie Christie, Terence Stamp, Monica Vitti, Sophia Loren, Claudia Cardinale, Celia Hammond and Dave Brubeck amongst other cultural figures of the era, shot for a range of both advertising and editorial commissions. Also included are eight original and unique contact prints – small photographs made by laying the negative directly onto the surface of the light sensitive paper. Donovan meticulously reviewed his contact sheets, indicating his selected frames by piercing them with a pen or marking them with a pen or chinagraph pencil. He discarded the contact prints of the frames he did not want used, keeping only those that he felt good enough to print or publish.These prints provide an important insight into Donovan’s working methods and his creative process.

Charting Donovan’s early career from 1959, when he opened up his first London studio, to the heights of his success throughout the 1960s, the works in the exhibition show how he helped to redefine photography and shape the aesthetic of London’s ‘Swinging Sixties’. The honesty and energy of Donovan’s photographs quickly helped to establish his own visual language rooted in the world he knew best – the streets of London’s East End, where he had grown up. Often situating his models in bomb-ravaged ruins or in industrial building sites, his gritty and noirish style looked to reportage, rather than fashion photography, for its inspiration. He worked for some of the most progressive magazines of the time including Queen, Town and London Life and his images quickly became emblematic of the era and established Donovan as a new force in British photography.