"The best (portrait photographer) since Nadar and Julia Margaret Cameron."
Francis Bacon
John Deakin (8 May 1912 – 25 May 1972) was an English photographer, best known for his work centred on members of Francis Bacon's Soho inner circle. Bacon based a number of his paintings on photographs he commissioned from Deakin, including portraits of Henrietta Moraes and Lucian Freud.
Deakin also spent many years in Paris and Rome, photographing street scenes. His only stable period of employment as a photographer were two periods of working for Vogue between 1947 and 1954. Deakin initially aspired to be a painter, and as his photographic career waned, Deakin devoted his time to painting in the 1960s, questioning the validity and status of photography as an art form. He showed little interest in curating and publicising his own work, holding only two exhibitions in his lieftime. As a result many of his photographs were lost, destroyed or damaged over time.
A chronic alcoholic, Deakin died in obscurity and poverty, but since the 1980s his reputation has grown through monographs, exhibitions and catalogues.
The photographs in the Hyman Collection contain a mix of subject matter, including two well-known portrait subjects, Kenneth Tynan (1952) and Siobhán McKenna (1952), a scene in the French House, Soho, showing proprietor Gaston Berlemont behind the bar, and unrecorded photographs of Picasso in his Paris studio. It gives a particular insight into his rare Parisian works
These vintage photographs of Paris offer a rare insight into one of the central aspects of Deakin's work, his street photographs. In contrast to his celebrated portraits, 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." Several of these "lost" photographs, which Farson considered to be some of Deakin's greatest works, were recently rediscovered and are now in the Hyman Collection.
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. Indeed in his lifetime Deakin's two published books were on London and Rome and, similarly, the only two exhibitions of his photographs were focused not on his portraits but on his urban reportage.
In the small catalogue for his Paris show Elizabeth Smart observed that "You certainly won't feel rested after a time in John Deakin's Paris. These pictures take you by the scruff of the neck and insist that you see. If you have never been to Paris, you will find it haunted when you arrive.... By some alchemy this photographer squeezes his heart through his lens, his pity or impudence egging him on!"
Deakin received critical acclaim for these photographs of Parisian street life. Vogue characterised the Paris photographs as "a painful, monstrously beautiful view of the city that never appeared in any guidebook'. A review by Colin MacInnes in The Times declared that "Mr Deakin has an astonishing eye for the peculiar hidden in the ordinary: where the casual observer sees only a shop-front or the façade of a house, Mr Deakin sees one side of Alice's looking glass, and the infinite mysteries that lie behind it." Art critic David Sylvester wrote in the Listener: "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."
The Hyman Collection includes several of these photographs, mounted on cream card, for what must have been a dummy for the proposed Paris book. Two additional spreads are in the collection of the Victoria and Albert museum.