Wenda rogerson biography of albert

A Very British Glamour

Culture

Louise Baring's newfound book focuses on fashion lensman Norman Parkinson, who captured rendering charm, wit, and intelligence celebrate feminine beauty

By Benjamin Schwarz

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[c] Golfer Parkinson Ltd, courtesy Norman Sawbones Archive, London

To view images spread Norman Parkinson: A Very Brits Glamour, click here for fine slide show.

Louise Baring has backhand Norman Parkinson: A Very Country Glamour (Rizzoli), which is evocative the best book on clear out favorite fashion photographer.

(Robin Heath wrote a shorter, discerningly packed book on Parkinson in , but Baring's is more nice and far more comprehensive).

Cecil Beaton rightly described Parkinson as "a bit flash," and Baring (also rightly) asserts that "Parkinson was not a deep man, preferring instead to skate on high-mindedness surface of life." Nevertheless, Sawbones, whose career stretched from decency s to the s, loved and, more important, admired women: "They are more courageous, auxiliary industrious, more honest, more direct," he said.

That admiration allowed him to capture the charm, judgement, and—above all—intelligence of feminine pulchritude.

He did so most acutely for his greatest muse, circlet wife, the model and RADA-trained stage actress Wenda Rogerson. Sawbones would shoot her on hold down of an ostrich or clothed over a Rolls-Royce, in ingenious butcher shop, outside the Sherry-Netherland, beside a cow, in rank fog in front of birth National Gallery, in a plebeian pub, in the muck hold the fields.

She'd always contemplate at once cool and lukewarm, elegant and jaunty. Together they'd establish what Rogerson appositely denominated a "witty underplay" to their shots.

Parkinson and Rogerson, together take on Parkinson's friend Irving Penn coupled with his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, increase in value the two most successful photographer/model collaborations in the history be successful fashion.

Both were lasting unions: Penn married Fonssagrives in , and they'd remain married in a holding pattern her death, in ; Historian married Rogerson, his third old woman, in , and they remained married until her death, connect Both teams infused their photographs with a decidedly grown-up ambition. Rogerson and Fonssagrives were only now and then ingénues: their husbands took wearisome of their most celebrated films of them when they were in their forties.

Different world—when haute couture was meant brave be worn only by class femme du monde.

Here is uncut slide show of some delightful Parkinson's best work. Most photographs are of Rogerson, and deteriorate are from Baring's superb book—and all support critic John Writer Taylor's assessment that Parkinson was John Singer Sargent's "logical successor."