by Silvia Messeri
John Deakin
crude, cutting and brutal photos by an anticonformist photographer
About 130 pictures by the English photographer John Deakin will be on show
at the Fratelli Alinari History of Photography Museum until March 31st.
Most of them are telling and pitiless portraits of many of artists who used
to frequent the London quarter of Soho between the 1950's and 60's; these
black and white photos tell us about a man whose only dream was to paint
and reach success through painting. Born in Bebington in 1912, Deakin took
up photography almost by chance when he was in Paris in 1939. He was so
good at it that, after the war, which he spent as a sergeant in the British
army's photographic and film unit, he managed to make his first contact
with "Vogue" magazine which liked his work and hired him for the first time
in 1947.
The essentiality and almost brutal reality of the portraits he carried
out for the famous magazine were in stark contrast to the more refined
work of his colleagues, though his brilliant work was not enough to save
him for the disorder in his life. Incapable of working for days at a time
when he was on a binder, careless about his photographic equipment that
he often lost or perhaps pawned, Vogue sacked Deakin for the second and
last time in 1954. He really felt most at his ease in the environment
of the pubs and clubs in the London quarter of Soho, a popular place among
artists and free spirits whom Deakin captured in his beautiful black and
white photos: Muriel Belcher, the proprietress of the Colony Room, Lucian
Freud, George Dyer and painter Francis Bacon. The latter, who rarely worked
from life, commissioned Deakin to carry out a series of portraits of friends
that he later used for his paintings. The photographs, all spotted with
paint, that were found on the floor of Bacon's studio, provide an efficient
synthesis of the history of this man, a photographer only by chance, who
was obsessed by painting. "John Deakin, photographs" Florence, Fratelli
Alinari History of Photography Museum Hours: from 10 a.m. to 7.30 p.m.
Open until 11.30 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Closed on Wednesdays.
FAN-Florence ART
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