From Bowie to Jagger, the photos that created legends

At roughly 6am on March 29 1977, Faye Dunaway met with the photographer Terry O’Neill by a pool in Hollywood. O’Neill, who hadn’t slept, had approached the actress at the Oscars rehearsal the previous day and proposed a last-minute photo shoot.

O’Neill’s longtime friend and collaborator Robin Morgan, former editor of the Sunday Times Magazine, tells the FT that the proposition went something like this: “We both know you’re going to win. I want to get something really special to record this . . . I’m staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, so are you. Would you come to the pool at 6am when the light’s perfect and there’s no security? I’ll keep it to 10 minutes.”

The resulting shots, with a languid Dunaway wearing a shell-pink robe and metallic stilettos, achieved that rare transcendent feat of photography: escaping the immediate moment and gesturing towards something wider. In this case, the mythology of Hollywood. O’Neill wanted to depict Dunaway’s dawning realisation that her life was about to change for ever. Over the next few years, the two sparked up a relationship and married in 1983.

Something peculiar happened when O’Neill photographed a star. Whether it was Elton John, Spike Lee, Pelé or Amy Winehouse, the subject was both elevated and, at the same time, rendered candidly human. This contradiction shines through in Stars, the upcoming O’Neill show at Fotografiska, New York, spanning six decades of work by the late photographer, who died in 2019.

What also shines through are the clothes, and their role in burnishing celebrity status. O’Neill photographed people from the world of fashion, including Kate Moss sitting like a dancer in a black lace bodysuit, and Cindy Crawford in 1990, with leather jacket and signature blown-out hair.

His other subjects often exude an ultraconfident style that would still fly today, not least when it comes to tailoring. See David Bowie in a mustard-yellow suit snapped in Los Angeles in 1974, Keanu Reeves in an unstructured tan blazer and Bianca Jagger in a three-piece white suit.

“He gives himself permission to celebrate the people in these images,” says Yoram Roth, the majority owner of Fotografiska. Stars has been over a year in the making, involving a major archival undertaking, trawling through hundreds of thousands of negatives, some of them colourised at the late photographer’s request.

O’Neill was born to working-class parents in Romford, and his work wasn’t always glamorous. He originally wanted to be a jazz drummer, but after finishing his national service he began working for the photographic department at the old London Airport (now Heathrow), documenting plane interiors. There, he spontaneously snapped a sleeping Rab Butler, Harold Macmillan’s home secretary, and minutes later was approached by a newspaper man looking to buy the photograph.

Working for the Daily Sketch in the early 1960s, when pop culture was booming, O’Neill began to master the art of recording celebrity. “We have to remember, we’re talking about the analogue age,” says Morgan, who commissioned O’Neill for the Sunday Times Magazine. “Back then, photographers were almost as important as film or rock ’n’ roll stars, because if you could get [stars’] faces in newspapers and magazines, that’s what sold tickets . . . So Terry became the go-to guy.”

O’Neill rejected the usual approach of controlled shoots in studios, opting instead to stow away in the stars’ daily routine, waiting for their most characterful moment to emerge. He once hid in Dean Martin’s dressing room, just to photograph him in those fleeting moments before he went on stage. Likewise, he caught Audrey Hepburn during a window of unguarded fun, playing cricket in the south of France.

On the recommendation of Ava Gardner, O’Neill was introduced into Frank Sinatra’s entourage and became his main photographer for several decades. “He could open doors,” Morgan says, recalling a failed attempt to interview Robert Redford that was solved only with the announcement of O’Neill’s involvement. “I’d love for you to come to Aspen,” read the actor’s subsequent reply.

By the late 1990s, O’Neill was taking fewer pictures. He was put off by the encroachment of managers and PRs on his work, as access to celebrity life became more tightly controlled — a trend that has increased. “The bottom line,” Morgan adds, “is that the digital age brought us a less honest photography in terms of famous faces.”

‘Terry O’Neill: Stars’, June 2-September 16, Fotografiska, New York

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