When men were blokes
Lucy Hughes-Hallett
HEROES+VILLAINS photographs by David Steen
Genesis, £150 (regular edition), £250 (deluxe leather edition, signed by Roger Moore) ISBN 00104351939 www.genesis-publications.com or tel: 01483 540970
Ever since David Steen joined Picture Post at the age of 15 he’s been photographing celebrities. This handsome collection of male portraits shows his range. At one end of the spectrum is the cheesy picture of Steven Spielberg with his foot in the mouth of an inflatable rubber shark. At the other, there is the poignant picture of Augustus John in the year before he died, his head bent over clasped hands as though in prayer, alone in the breakfast room of a provincial hotel, in chilly grey natural light. For the former, Steen flew to Los Angeles (even though Spielberg could only give him an hour) and scouted for props. The latter he got by serendipity when, in 1960, he just happened to be staying in the same hotel as John. A quickly snatched opportunity, but the outcome is a tellingly composed picture.
Steen, as he tells us in the chatty notes that accompany these pictures, was an autograph-hunting boy who hung around stage doors, and as an adult he adored the fact that his chosen work brought him into regular contact with the immensely famous. But there’s a gently surreal irony to many of these pictures: Terence Stamp, gorgeous in pale linen, chomping on what, at first blush, looks like a large and notably phallic cigar but which is actually a carrot; Harold Macmillan (‘a lonely man’, guesses Steen) pottering in his depressingly frilly bedroom; Rod Stewart leering suggestively down his long nose as he lies back in bed, legs spread beneath a flimsy sheet, as sleek and vain and shameless as the cat nestling in his armpit.
Despite its title, this isn’t a pantheon of heroes, but it is a celebration of manly beauty. David Niven saunters up a beach with tight trunks and a seductive smile (Steen likes to get his subjects undressed). Pete Townshend, thoughtfully dragging on a joint, is dark against a white wall, hieratically upright with pale eyes and hands as carefully disposed as a mediaeval Christ. And where the subject is not himself such a pleasure to the eye, Steen kindly compensates with a stylish setting. Here’s David Frost bisected by the crisp curve of a Sixties ‘Space Age’ chair; Edward Heath framed in a sashwindow; Hurricane Higgins sprawled across a snooker table, his little eyes halfhidden by a white fedora — all of them evidence that you don’t need to be a beauty to make a beautiful picture.
These are names evocative of a distant past. Steen began his career before the second world war. The pleasures of this volume are as much nostalgic as they are aesthetic. The first picture is of Harold Wilson asleep on a train. It’s a wonderful piece of visual storytelling. The prime minister, in grainy soft-focus, is curled sideways with sweetly childish grace and dwarfed by the (also sleeping but primly upright) commuters beside him. It says a lot about Wilson, the supple modern man alongside these stiff first-classtravelling fogies. But it is also, to anyone who was alive in Britain in 1963, intensely evocative of that lost world, where trains had armrests upholstered in prickly striped velvet and there were monogrammed antimacassars behind every lolling head.
It’s not only the fixtures and fittings that were different when Steen was young. This volume crackles with a kind of brashly ostentatious masculinity that seems almost as quaint as Roger Daltrey’s perm, Freddie Laker’s gold medallion, or the bobble-fringed lampshade next to which Bobby Moore poses in déshabillé. Steen’s arch reference to the dimensions of Nureyev’s ‘manhood’ and his anecdote about the ‘fun-filled days’ he enjoyed in Malibu with Lee Marvin, while the latter got crazy-drunk and fired guns into the surf, are manifestations of a mind-set which now — post-feminism, post the health-club boom — is all but defunct. The pictures are wittily sequenced on the same principle as a game of dominoes, each one having something in common with the one before, and there is a whole run of them showing men smoking. You wouldn’t see that nowadays.
Steen is a pro — technically accomplished and unpretentious. The great thing about posing a man in a hammock, he explains, is that it makes a double-page spread, so the photographer gets paid more. His portrait of Peter O’Toole was taken on one of the actor’s bad-tempered days, he recalls, but it is a lovely shot — a profile of O’Toole laughing, that famously lugubrious face lightened and animated. The subject might not be obliging, but Steen still got his picture.
There aren’t really any heroes in this book: Steen is palpably too perceptive and level-headed for hero-worship. Nor are there any villains, though Oliver Reed, posing preposterously with his gun, does his best to look like one. But there are 100 fine photographs, intensely redolent of the period that produced them, and still looking good some 40 years on.
Previous page
