David Bailey UK, 1938
The Rolling Stones, 1968
Inkjet on HFA Pearl paper, unframed
Signed by the artist, on verso
Signed by the artist, on verso
Image: 50.8 x 50.8 cm
Sheet: 58.4 x 58.4 cm
Sheet: 58.4 x 58.4 cm
Edition of 30 + 3AP
© David Bailey
£ 25,000.00 + VAT
By 1968, David Bailey had already redrawn the terms of British portraiture, moving fashion and music photography away from the studio-bound formality of his predecessors and toward a documentary immediacy...
By 1968, David Bailey had already redrawn the terms of British portraiture, moving fashion and music photography away from the studio-bound formality of his predecessors and toward a documentary immediacy shot through with editorial wit. His relationship with the Rolling Stones stems from his early friendship with Mick Jagger, and his photography of the band carries the ease of familiarity rather than the distance of assignment. This particular sitting falls within a sustained body of work Bailey produced of the group from their early venues through to their stadium years, a project that runs parallel to his celebrated Box of Pin-Ups portfolio of 1965, in which the Stones’ manager Andrew Oldham himself appeared as a subject.
Bailey favours a tight, frontal grouping that compresses the five figures into a single graphic block, denying any single member visual primacy and instead presenting the Stones as a unified cultural proposition. Colour becomes an instrument of the times, situating the band within the unmistakable character of the late 1960s rather than the monochrome grammar of his earlier portraiture seen in his Box of Pin Ups series. Here, the playful nature and the informality signal a shift already underway, tailoring toward the looser, more countercultural styling the group adopted around the release of Beggars Banquet.
The year of the sitting places the work at a genuine hinge point in British social history: 1968 was the year of international student unrest, the escalation of the Vietnam War as a subject of youth protest, and the Stones’ own brush with controversy following drug prosecutions earlier in the decade. Bailey’s photograph, taken amid this ferment, does not moralise or dramatise; it simply records five figures who had become, almost incidentally, emblems of a generational rupture with deference and convention. That restraint is itself the mark of Bailey’s method, one shared across his portraits of Warhol, Shrimpton and the Beatles, in which the sitter’s cultural weight is allowed to register through composure rather than through overt staging.
Bailey favours a tight, frontal grouping that compresses the five figures into a single graphic block, denying any single member visual primacy and instead presenting the Stones as a unified cultural proposition. Colour becomes an instrument of the times, situating the band within the unmistakable character of the late 1960s rather than the monochrome grammar of his earlier portraiture seen in his Box of Pin Ups series. Here, the playful nature and the informality signal a shift already underway, tailoring toward the looser, more countercultural styling the group adopted around the release of Beggars Banquet.
The year of the sitting places the work at a genuine hinge point in British social history: 1968 was the year of international student unrest, the escalation of the Vietnam War as a subject of youth protest, and the Stones’ own brush with controversy following drug prosecutions earlier in the decade. Bailey’s photograph, taken amid this ferment, does not moralise or dramatise; it simply records five figures who had become, almost incidentally, emblems of a generational rupture with deference and convention. That restraint is itself the mark of Bailey’s method, one shared across his portraits of Warhol, Shrimpton and the Beatles, in which the sitter’s cultural weight is allowed to register through composure rather than through overt staging.