stenio solinas

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LONDON

Stenio Solinas

A dyslexic boy, grown in the East End, the City in his mind, the working class on the skin. “If your present is this, the future waiting for you is: cars thief, boxer or maybe musician “.
The military service catches him off-balance while he's trying to improve the last one of the three opportunities, and he dreams to be Chet Baker. Stationed at Singapore, a self-timer photo gives an image of him in his service quarters: a Picasso copy hanging over the bed, the uniform coming out from the wardrobe and he lying, dressing military shorts and bare-chested, staring as whom shows self-confident, but does not exactly know what is waiting for him.
1956 and the young David Bailey, in his hands an affiliated brand of the Rolleiflex purchased from a Chinese usurer, starts wondering if the sound that will get him away from his status of maladjusted person does not reassemble to that click. Demobilized two years later starting the sixties, it's already a certainty: he has founded his inspiration in an awkward and inexperienced eighteen-years-old girl, her name is Jean Shrimpton, her legs excessively long remembering Bambi, a mix of sensuality and chasteness.
Bailey soon understands that she is different from the patinated models by then in full vogue, eccentric as he is too in the fashion world. From the fellowship, Jean will come out as the new “sex icon” of the ten-year period and David as the singer of that unique costume phenomena, social, cultural and musical, that was the pop, a new kind of freedom in moves and relationships.
“Birth of the Cool” is the title of the exposition the Barbican Art Gallery has devoted to Bailey, to his images and the spirit of these times: more than 300 photos, some of them so well known and so significant of the period that they've lost the signature of whom made them and have risen to an own life.
Here it is the young Mick Jagger in 1964, a tweed jacket and a two-stud-collar shirt, the perverse innocence of a face not yet worried by excesses.
Here it is Jean Birkin and her child breasts, Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate photographed in their privacy few months before the Manson band killed her and threw him in hell. Here there is Catherine Deneuve, Bailey will marry and from whom he will later divorce. Michael Caine and his class without class. The Beatles, and then Mary Quant, the miniskirt inventor.
Models, singers, fashion designers, money makers, gangsters, the swinging London of Bailey is a concentrate of impudence and indifference, of coldness and naturalness, of all the meanings the word “cool” embodies and refer to.
When Michelangelo Antonioni thought to immortalize with "Blow up" a climate and a style, he referred to the world and the figure of Bailey, to that slipping away with disenchantment standing by staggering models, to that contrast of luxury and suburbs, to that idea all could be seen and stopped by an image without becoming conspiratorial, victim or exegete.
The end of an epoch can be sensed by the choices of whom is someway called to embody it. Penelope Tree, the seventeen-years-old model, daughter of a banker and a United Nations ambassador, and that ending the ten-year period became the new muse of Bailey, explains by her face and the excessiveness of the lineaments, something restless and infantile grotesque, what it is getting ready behind the corner.
Coming from East End, from that unbelievable background of proletarianism without socialism, of popular nationalism, where the social classes were mixed since nobody knew anymore which was one's own, and where delinquency is anarchism, not looking after justifications, just a way as others to 'work', having not any redemption to expect, prevented him both from intellectualising himself and fossilising himself.
The sixties gave up their place to a more violent and messianic counterculture, plenty of fury and foreboding horrors. Bailey will pass through it making other things, the director, the portrayer, and going on making what he has always done without worrying about being considered “committed“.
"Goodbye Baby & Amen" is the greeting in book shape that he made to the unrepeatable ten-year period of which he was a protagonist.
A dry-eyed greeting, cold and amused, “cool”, to use the word that is his author's mark.