Elite Traveler January-February 2017

“In many ways, my career was a series of lucky breaks. The 1960s were a great time to be alive and young, especially in London. We were all just kids, really, and I happened to walk into a job taking pictures. When I was hired by a paper, I was the youngest photographer there. They wanted someone young to take photos of the new bands that were starting to take off.” He’d got that job thanks to another lucky break, having bumped into then British foreign secretary Rab Butler asleep at London Airport, where O’Neill was working at the time. He sold the picture to the paper and then got the job. “For my first assignment they told me to go down to Abbey Road and take a photo of a new band called The Beatles. I didn’t know what I was doing, so I took the four outside and got Ringo to hold up a snare drum to indicate he was the drummer. It was quite silly when you look at it now, but that shot landed in the papers – the papers sold out and I was off and running.” But, as is often the case, the after-the-fact success story doesn’t tell the whole story and O’Neill doesn’t make light of the hard work involved. “I’ve always tried to work hard. Most of my career involved a fair amount of hustling to get the photo and then to sell it. When I got fed up with the assignments they were giving me at my first job – they’d have me go to tragic, disaster sites and take photos of the aftermath, which I just couldn’t do as it was too depressing – I left. When I told the editor I was leaving he said to me that I was making a huge mistake and that I’d never work again. That really scared me and so I’ve been running ever since.” So much so that even as his latest project – a photographic tribute to David Bowie (see below) – is just landing, he is already lining up future projects. Like most celebrity photographers of his generation, O’Neill has a huge archive of amazing celebrity snaps, many previously unseen. For all the idea of the decisive moment, O’Neill is realistic about the value of these outtakes. “I don’t mind it. Often, photos that were considered outtakes might be better or more interesting than the one originally chosen. From three or four rolls of film I was only looking for one or two pictures that would work for a magazine or newspaper. I was looking at the photos for a different purpose and I love it when we start looking at the contact sheets again because it brings me back to when I took the photos in the first place.” So which area of the back catalog is next up? O’Neill suggests it will be a project around all his work behind the scenes on film sets. “We’ve been talking about having a look through all the on-set photography I’ve done over my career, including actors such as Michael Caine, Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren, Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Raquel Welch and Terence Stamp. It’s quite a list. I think that would make a really interesting book.”

Going through the outtakes for the book “I love it when we start looking at the contact sheets again because it brings me back to when I took the photos in the first place.” A lifetime's work Terry O'Neill with some of his iconic prints. London in the 1960s was the right place and time

BOWIE BY O'NEILL – A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMOIR

Terry O’Neill launched his career photographing up-and-coming bands across London in the 1960s. Alongside shoots for the likes of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, it was inevitable that he would photograph the young David Bowie. He says even in the early days, it was clear Bowie was something special. “I’d been working nonstop for more than a decade when I got the call to come to the Marquee to take photos of the last performance of Ziggy Stardust. I’d worked with a lot of famous people

by then. As soon as I saw Bowie, I thought ‘this is going to be different.’ He was more than a singer. He was an actor, a performer. The music he created was part of the overall role, especially in the 1970s. He was incredibly intelligent and aware of what he was creating. It’s hard to describe it, but he was incredibly important to people.” This strength of feeling explains O’Neill’s recent project, a book of photographs of Bowie. As O’Neill explains: “This is my tribute to David

Bowie. We printed only 500 copies of this first edition and it comes with two signed prints – one of Bowie with William Burroughs and one with Elizabeth Taylor. It comes in a silk case, and we commissioned a relief based on one of my portraits for the cover. We might publish a smaller book in the future, but to start we wanted to create something extraordinary. The Burroughs and Bowie image was only rediscovered as we were putting together this book. I thought those negatives were lost.”