John Deakin's Paris
The Photography Sales Gallery at the Centre for British Photography is delighted to present an incredibly rare opportunity to acquire vintage works by John Deakin. These vintage photographs offer a rare insight into one of the central aspects of Deakin's work, his street photographs, as well as including unpublished photographs of Picasso in his studio.
"The pictures of Paris by John Deakin present a vision that is profoundly personal and profoundly strange, a vision which confounds and undermines all notions of where inanimate ends and animate takes over." David Sylvester, The Listener, 1956.
In contrast to his celebrated portraits of Francis Bacon and other Soho luminaries, Robin Muir writes that "Deakin's street photographs appear mostly to have slipped from view... Dan Farson lamented particularly the loss of his series on the 'clochards', the down-and-outs of Paris." Fortunately, this new exhibition reveals several of these "lost" photographs which are presented here for the first time since 1956. Although by the mid 1950s Deakin was a successful fashion and portrait photographer for Vogue magazine, it is significant that it was his Parisian street photography that he chose to present in his first exhibition, John Deakin's Paris at the Archer Gallery in 1956, and that he also attempted to secure a publisher for his Paris photographs.
