David Bailey valuation
The photographer of the London sixties, from Jean Shrimpton to the Krays.
David Bailey was born in Leytonstone in 1938, left school barely able to read because of undiagnosed dyslexia, and was on contract at British Vogue by 1960.
What a work by David Bailey is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
David Bailey was born in Leytonstone in 1938, left school barely able to read because of undiagnosed dyslexia, and was on contract at British Vogue by 1960. What followed defined how the decade looks to everyone who was not there: Jean Shrimpton in New York, the 1965 Box of Pin-Ups with Mick Jagger, Michael Caine, David Hockney and the Kray twins, and a way of shooting fashion that stripped out the props and the pretence. He was the model for the photographer in Antonioni's Blow-Up. He has published steadily for sixty years, moved between fashion, portraiture, reportage and painting, and was knighted for services to photography.
A very large body of work with correspondingly variable editions: the famous images exist in several formats and sizes made at different dates, and the edition size is not something that can be assumed from the picture. Vintage gelatin silver prints from the period are a different proposition from the large pigment prints issued later, and both are collected. Signature is usually in ink, on the recto or the verso, alongside an edition number and often a studio stamp. Provenance from the publisher or a named gallery does real work here.
At a glance
- Born
- 1938, Leytonstone
David Bailey's Box of Pin-Ups
The best-known Bailey publication is the Box of Pin-Ups, issued by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1965: thirty-six loose portraits of the people who defined London that year, from the Beatles and Mick Jagger to Jean Shrimpton, Michael Caine and the Kray twins, with notes on each sitter by Francis Wyndham, in a printed card box. There was only one printing.
The sheets are halftone reproductions on paper, not photographic prints, and they are often framed singly and taken for photographs. A complete box with all thirty-six sheets is a collected object in its own right, and single sheets are worth a fraction of it. Signed photographic prints of the same images, made later in editions, are a separate and more valuable thing, and the paper, signature and edition details tell them apart.
The Black Trinity, Ritz and the documentaries
Bailey bought his first camera, a Rolleiflex, while on national service with the RAF in Singapore, and worked as an assistant to David Ollins and then at John French's studio in 1959 before Vogue took him on. With Terence Donovan and Brian Duffy he made up what Norman Parkinson called the Black Trinity, and at his busiest he shot 800 pages of Vogue editorial in a year. In the early 1970s he made television documentaries on Cecil Beaton, Luchino Visconti and Andy Warhol, and in 1976 he started Ritz, a newspaper, with David Litchfield.
The Victoria and Albert Museum gave him a retrospective in 1983, the Barbican showed Birth of the Cool in 1999, and the National Portrait Gallery showed Bailey's Stardust in 2014. Copies of the Box of Pin-Ups have been reported to sell for more than £20,000, and Lord Snowdon's objection to the inclusion of the Krays is given as the reason no American edition or second British printing followed.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
