David Farrell: photographer of the 20th century

Associated media

Stephen Kingsley reports on an exhibition that reveals the talents of a man who photographed the famous while staying out of the lime-light

Photographs should show life as it is, images should be real and should not be posed and, although this is my personal view, it seems to have been shared by the photographer David Farrell, who died last year at the age of 93.  Indeed, the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition at the Osborne Samuel Gallery quotes Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom Farrell admired: ‘People think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.  In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject’.  Many of Farrell’s photographs at this exhibition do show the smallest things and reveal a greater feeling of life than some of his better-known images.

Farrell became a photographer by chance.  His first love was music.  He was an accomplished violinist, but he gave up his studies at the Royal Academy of Music at the outbreak of the Second World War and joined the RAF as bomber pilot.  After the war, with a wife and family to support, he moved to Gloucestershire and started a recording studio and, to supplement his income in quiet times, bought a camera and with the help of his wife, Joyce Manning, started taking family portraits. 

In his obituary, the Guardian quotes his daughter, Cassie, as saying he had to ‘photograph a lot of rich people's kids, and the whole hunting fraternity. He became very in demand among the county set’. Farrell also became acquainted with his more intellectual and artistic neighbours, including playwright Peter Nichols and sculptor Lynn Chadwick and through their friendship expanded his own rôle as a photographer.  Farrell photographed Chadwick at work as well as the work itself and went on to photograph sculptors Anthony Caro and Eduardo Paolozzi.   His musical links led him to photograph Yehudi Menuhin, Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn.  As his reputation grew he was engaged to make the ‘stills’ for promoting cinema films and worked on many of the major films of the 1960s and 1970s,  later photographing stars of film, theatre and popular music.

A self-taught photographer, Farrell experimented with different camera formats including, in his later years, digital photography.  He generally developed and printed his own work in order to maintain control over the entire process through to producing the final image.  He was always regarded as a modest and unobtrusive photographer, modelling himself on Cartier-Bresson and, again like Cartier-Bresson, preferring a more human and intimate image.  Thus he often photographed performers in rehearsal rather than in public performance.

The exhibition displays about 40 images – all monochrome apart from one glorious picture of Jacqueline du Pré performing Elgar’s Cello Concerto – the majority from the 1960s and 1970s.  The front room has the better-known subjects – and, to my mind, the less effective photographs: the group portrait of the Beatles is very wooden, the Rolling Stones more mobile but still too deliberately posed, and while the pictures of Louis Armstrong and Ravi Shankar are very effective there is still a degree of artificiality.  The same complaint can be made about his well-known portrait of Leonard Bernstein, but then the photographs seem to relax and become more fluid and natural.  Alongside the colour photograph of Jacqueline du Pré is an informal shot of her with her husband, Daniel Barenboim.  The photograph of André Previn rehearsing an orchestra is natural and fluid, and a shot of Yehudi Menuhin and Maurice Gendron carrying their instrument cases on their heads en route to a rehearsal in Bath is both fun and charming. 

The second room has images of various sculptors and their work.  The image of Henry Moore working a small clay model, with the artist’s enormous white hand and arm in the foreground, conveys most effectively an impression of Moore’s larger works.  The room also contains some images of stage and screen which are interesting from an historical point of view – Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau and a (possibly) topless Judi Dench in rehearsal for Peter Hall’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Nonetheless, it is the third room that contains the gems of the exhibition – principally early photographs from the 1940s and 1950s with street scenes of Gloucester, beach scenes in Wales and photographs of characters, unknown but interesting nevertheless.  A later photograph of a group of children fishing in a pond on Hampstead Heath is full of light and interest. Indeed, I wish there could have been more of these informal images, which are compelling vignettes of a life gone by.

By all accounts David Farrell was a charming man.  He became, almost by chance, a successful photographer but he never abandoned music and frequently played with friends and family and, sometimes, with his photographic subjects.  Photography became his life and he photographed many of the most well-known faces of the 20th century yet he never wanted to be a ‘big name’ in the photographic world. Like his role model, Cartier-Bresson, he preferred to be in the background, observing and recording.  Consequently, Farrell is not as well known as some of his contemporaries.  This exhibition is an important vehicle to remind us of the man – many of his photographs will be familiar, his name less so.  Most of all, the exhibition illustrates the importance of Farrell’s work as a record of a particular era, not just the famous names but also the images of day-to day life.

David Farrell, photographer, born 28 August 1919, died 3 January 2013.