In 1934, when he was still a burgeoning 21-year-old photographer shooting portraits of debutants for London society magazines, Norman Parkinson had one simple goal: “unlocking the model’s knees.” It seems strange now, but until then, as he later explained in The Telegraph, “all the girls had their knees bolted together. . . . I thought, I don’t know any girls who live like that.”
It was from this frustration that the candid style we know today as Parkinson’s signature was born. By bringing the model outside of the artificially lighted studio and giving her something to do other than sitting down and posing rigidly, he was able to exploit chance movements and gestures and, as a result, capture what had been missing from fashion photography during the postwar doldrums of the late 1940s: a sense of the unexpected.
Parkinson (just Parks to friends) brought this new style to America during his first trip to New York City, for a Vogue shoot in 1949…
1913 Ronald William Parkinson Smith born in Putney, South West London. He lives with his parents, brother, and sister in a middle-class semidetached house.
1917 Sent with his sister to live on a farm in Oxfordshire to wait out World War I.
1927 Although he later will describe his father as a “failed barrister who never made more than EURO950 a year,” Ronald is sent to the relatively expensive and exclusive private school Westminster, in Central London. He will show a talent for art and win the Henry Luce Award under the tutelage of art master Harold Sandys Williamson, the well-known painter and poster artist.
1931 Upon leaving Westminster, begins an apprenticeship with court photographers Speaight & Sons of Bond Street.
1933 Fired by Speaight & Sons for misuse of the equipment.
1934 Opens the Norman Parkinson photography studio at 1 Dover Street with former Speaight apprentice Norman Kibblewhite. Kibblewhite soon leaves, but Parkinson retains the studio—and adopts its name as his own (although friends and colleagues continue to refer to him simply as Parks).
1935 Begins shooting monthly assignments for London’s Harper’s Bazaar, as well as portraits and reportage for Bystander magazine. Marries Margaret Banks, daughter of Conservative Member of Parliament Sir Reginald Mitchell Banks.
1937 Shoots a series of photo essays as part of a recruiting campaign for the British Armed Services. Collaborates with French photographer Francis Brugière on a photomural for the British Pavilion of the Exposition Universelle in Paris.
1938 Travels to America for the first time to cover the New York World’s Fair for Bystander.
1939 Forced to close studio at 1 Dover Street after it is hit by a bomb during the Blitz. Many of his prints and negatives are lost.
1940 Divorces Margaret Banks.
1941 Begins what will be a long association with British Vogue.
1942 Marries second wife, Thelma Woolley (née Blay.) The marriage will later end in divorce.
1944 His first photographs appear in Vogue: a portfolio detailing how British fashion editors are coping during the bombs and rationing of World War II. “As many of our readers know, we have a British Vogue as well as an American Vogue,” the caption introducing the piece reads. “It occurred to us that you would like to know how the staff of British Vogue manages to live, work, and dress under all the difficulties.”
1947 Marries third wife, model and RADA-trained stage actress Wenda Rogerson, after being introduced by Cecil Beaton. They will raise a son, Simon, and Wenda will remain Parks’s muse for the rest of her life. Decades later, The Atlantic will refer to their relationship as one of the “most successful photographer-model collaborations in the history of fashion.”
1949 May: Tiring of postwar shortages in Britain, writes to Vogue art director Alexander Liberman, asking if he “might take a few photographs”for the magazine. Liberman replies with a job offer. Parkinson flies to New York; Wenda and Simon follow in June. August: Fashion pages shot by Parkinson in Manhattan appear in Vogue. Straightaway, his candid shots of models walking the streets of the city stand out from the rest of the magazine’s posed studio sittings. October: Does his first Vogue cover, an over-the-shoulder shot of Wenda Parkinson in a wool flannel suit, captured through a storefront window.
1950 Takes first trip to Jamaica, beginning a lifelong love of the Caribbean.
1952 Captures Babe Paley and her children playing in the garden of her Long Island home, Kiluna Farm, for December Vogue.
1960 Made associate contributing editor of Queen magazine.
1963 Although still keeping a house in Twickenham, South West London, begins to spend most of his time on his farm on the Caribbean island of Tobago, where he and wife Wenda breed Creole horses, cows, and pigs, and will later produce their own sausages, Parkinson’s Bangers.
1965 Sent to Tahiti by Vogue editor in chief Diana Vreeland, accompanied by two models and “200 pounds of gold and silver Dynel” (fake hair), with DV’s directive to create images “more Gauguin than Gauguin.”The resulting “Gilded Summer” shoot spreads out over 33 pages in the May issue.
1968 Made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society.
1969 Invited by the royal family to be the official photographer for the Investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle.
1971 Works with stylist Grace Coddington for the first time on an assignment in the Seychelles for British Vogue. In future, she will refer to him as her mentor and—as she will tell a reporter for Intelligent Life magazine—“the father anyone would want to have.”Parkinson commissioned to shoot the Queen’s only daughter, Princess Anne, for her official twenty-first birthday portrait. One newspaper comments that Anne, “who would find no rivals as the world’s grumpiest princess, looks soft and lovely, amiable and charming through Parks’s lens.”
1975 Travels to the Soviet Union with Grace Coddington and model Jerry Hall to shoot a fashion portfolio for British Vogue. “Allegedly, Parkinson, Hall, and Coddington eluded KGB bugs by planning their shoots in his hotel bathroom, tap water running,”The Telegraph will later report.
1978 Alexander Liberman terminates his contract with Condé Nast. Parkinson becomes a free agent, sometimes working with rival Hearst.
1980 Photographs the Queen Mother for her official eightieth birthday portrait.
1981 The retrospective “Photographs by Norman Parkinson: Fifty Years of Portraits and Fashion” opens at London’s National Portrait Gallery. Parkinson made a Commander of the British Empire for services to photography.
1983 A pictorial memoir, Fifty Years of Style and Fashion, published to coincide with the opening of his first exhibit in the U.S., at Sotheby’s galleries in New York.
1987 Tina Brown, editor of Vanity Fair, coaxes him back into the Condé Nast fold, and he begins shooting for the magazine. October: Wenda Parkinson dies at their home in Twickenham. December: The National Academy of Design stages a show of his work, cohosted by Vanity Fair. It’s only the second photography exhibit in the academy’s 162-year history. In a poignant coincidence, the cover of the catalog is a photo of Wenda he had accidentally rediscovered just a few days before her death.
1990 In February, while on location in Malaysia, collapses with a brain hemorrhage in his hotel room. Dies one week later from complications of bronchial phenomena, as well heart problems. Interred in a private burial ground overlooking his home on Tobago. In an interview with the BBC, recorded before his death, he says, “I couldn’t bear to be buried with people that I have not been introduced to.”
Norman Parkinson
http://www.vogue.com/voguepedia/Norman_Parkinson
In 1934, when he was still a burgeoning 21-year-old photographer shooting portraits of debutants for London society magazines, Norman Parkinson had one simple goal: “unlocking the model’s knees.” It seems strange now, but until then, as he later explained in The Telegraph, “all the girls had their knees bolted together. . . . I thought, I don’t know any girls who live like that.”
It was from this frustration that the candid style we know today as Parkinson’s signature was born. By bringing the model outside of the artificially lighted studio and giving her something to do other than sitting down and posing rigidly, he was able to exploit chance movements and gestures and, as a result, capture what had been missing from fashion photography during the postwar doldrums of the late 1940s: a sense of the unexpected.
Parkinson (just Parks to friends) brought this new style to America during his first trip to New York City, for a Vogue shoot in 1949…
1913 Ronald William Parkinson Smith born in Putney, South West London. He lives with his parents, brother, and sister in a middle-class semidetached house.
1917 Sent with his sister to live on a farm in Oxfordshire to wait out World War I.
1927 Although he later will describe his father as a “failed barrister who never made more than EURO950 a year,” Ronald is sent to the relatively expensive and exclusive private school Westminster, in Central London. He will show a talent for art and win the Henry Luce Award under the tutelage of art master Harold Sandys Williamson, the well-known painter and poster artist.
1931 Upon leaving Westminster, begins an apprenticeship with court photographers Speaight & Sons of Bond Street.
1933 Fired by Speaight & Sons for misuse of the equipment.
1934 Opens the Norman Parkinson photography studio at 1 Dover Street with former Speaight apprentice Norman Kibblewhite. Kibblewhite soon leaves, but Parkinson retains the studio—and adopts its name as his own (although friends and colleagues continue to refer to him simply as Parks).
1935 Begins shooting monthly assignments for London’s Harper’s Bazaar, as well as portraits and reportage for Bystander magazine. Marries Margaret Banks, daughter of Conservative Member of Parliament Sir Reginald Mitchell Banks.
1937 Shoots a series of photo essays as part of a recruiting campaign for the British Armed Services. Collaborates with French photographer Francis Brugière on a photomural for the British Pavilion of the Exposition Universelle in Paris.
1938 Travels to America for the first time to cover the New York World’s Fair for Bystander.
1939 Forced to close studio at 1 Dover Street after it is hit by a bomb during the Blitz. Many of his prints and negatives are lost.
1940 Divorces Margaret Banks.
1941 Begins what will be a long association with British Vogue.
1942 Marries second wife, Thelma Woolley (née Blay.) The marriage will later end in divorce.
1944 His first photographs appear in Vogue: a portfolio detailing how British fashion editors are coping during the bombs and rationing of World War II. “As many of our readers know, we have a British Vogue as well as an American Vogue,” the caption introducing the piece reads. “It occurred to us that you would like to know how the staff of British Vogue manages to live, work, and dress under all the difficulties.”
1947 Marries third wife, model and RADA-trained stage actress Wenda Rogerson, after being introduced by Cecil Beaton. They will raise a son, Simon, and Wenda will remain Parks’s muse for the rest of her life. Decades later, The Atlantic will refer to their relationship as one of the “most successful photographer-model collaborations in the history of fashion.”
1949 May: Tiring of postwar shortages in Britain, writes to Vogue art director Alexander Liberman, asking if he “might take a few photographs”for the magazine. Liberman replies with a job offer. Parkinson flies to New York; Wenda and Simon follow in June. August: Fashion pages shot by Parkinson in Manhattan appear in Vogue. Straightaway, his candid shots of models walking the streets of the city stand out from the rest of the magazine’s posed studio sittings. October: Does his first Vogue cover, an over-the-shoulder shot of Wenda Parkinson in a wool flannel suit, captured through a storefront window.
1950 Takes first trip to Jamaica, beginning a lifelong love of the Caribbean.
1952 Captures Babe Paley and her children playing in the garden of her Long Island home, Kiluna Farm, for December Vogue.
1960 Made associate contributing editor of Queen magazine.
1963 Although still keeping a house in Twickenham, South West London, begins to spend most of his time on his farm on the Caribbean island of Tobago, where he and wife Wenda breed Creole horses, cows, and pigs, and will later produce their own sausages, Parkinson’s Bangers.
1965 Sent to Tahiti by Vogue editor in chief Diana Vreeland, accompanied by two models and “200 pounds of gold and silver Dynel” (fake hair), with DV’s directive to create images “more Gauguin than Gauguin.”The resulting “Gilded Summer” shoot spreads out over 33 pages in the May issue.
1968 Made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society.
1969 Invited by the royal family to be the official photographer for the Investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle.
1971 Works with stylist Grace Coddington for the first time on an assignment in the Seychelles for British Vogue. In future, she will refer to him as her mentor and—as she will tell a reporter for Intelligent Life magazine—“the father anyone would want to have.”Parkinson commissioned to shoot the Queen’s only daughter, Princess Anne, for her official twenty-first birthday portrait. One newspaper comments that Anne, “who would find no rivals as the world’s grumpiest princess, looks soft and lovely, amiable and charming through Parks’s lens.”
1975 Travels to the Soviet Union with Grace Coddington and model Jerry Hall to shoot a fashion portfolio for British Vogue. “Allegedly, Parkinson, Hall, and Coddington eluded KGB bugs by planning their shoots in his hotel bathroom, tap water running,”The Telegraph will later report.
1978 Alexander Liberman terminates his contract with Condé Nast. Parkinson becomes a free agent, sometimes working with rival Hearst.
1980 Photographs the Queen Mother for her official eightieth birthday portrait.
1981 The retrospective “Photographs by Norman Parkinson: Fifty Years of Portraits and Fashion” opens at London’s National Portrait Gallery. Parkinson made a Commander of the British Empire for services to photography.
1983 A pictorial memoir, Fifty Years of Style and Fashion, published to coincide with the opening of his first exhibit in the U.S., at Sotheby’s galleries in New York.
1987 Tina Brown, editor of Vanity Fair, coaxes him back into the Condé Nast fold, and he begins shooting for the magazine. October: Wenda Parkinson dies at their home in Twickenham. December: The National Academy of Design stages a show of his work, cohosted by Vanity Fair. It’s only the second photography exhibit in the academy’s 162-year history. In a poignant coincidence, the cover of the catalog is a photo of Wenda he had accidentally rediscovered just a few days before her death.
1990 In February, while on location in Malaysia, collapses with a brain hemorrhage in his hotel room. Dies one week later from complications of bronchial phenomena, as well heart problems. Interred in a private burial ground overlooking his home on Tobago. In an interview with the BBC, recorded before his death, he says, “I couldn’t bear to be buried with people that I have not been introduced to.”