Fashionable Photographer
Photobiography. By Cecil Beaton. (Odhams. t8s.)
THIS is a curious and revealing book. On the surface it is trashy, the story not of a life but of a life's programme, scrambled together anyhow, repetitive and shapeless. It is as one-sided as a novelette : there is no failure in it, no suffering, no serious obstacles to be over- come ; scarcely a cross word is heard throughout. After leaving Cambridge Mr. Beaton did indeed work for a few dreary months in a city office, but within a short time he had become launched on his career as photographer to the famous, and, for a quarter of century, it has gone on with hardly a break.
As a photographer, ,Mr. Beaton has a notable gift and a deep weakness. His gift is his love of beauty, which is real. He clearly loves the sight and company of beautiful women, he has con- siderable insight into his sitters' personalities, and devotes himself to making the best of them in his pictures with ardour, taste and concentration. Making the best of them, that is to say, so far as the arrangement of his pictures goes—for his defect is that, he has never been willing to face the boring and arduous work of mastering photographic technique. He is a camera-artist who does not really understand or care for cameras. Not only does he send his nega- tives to be developed and printed by a capable firm—which seems to me like having one's sonnets translated by Harrods—but he sees photography always in terms of the posed picture within an enclosing frame. It is a staggering fact that he has produced a book on ballet in which, out of a hundred-odd photographs, there is not one of actual movement. That is, of the two elements, time and space, that make up a photograph, Beaton excludes time altogether. His pictures are preconceived, fanciful, constructions in spaCe, and when he speaks of his own contribution to photography, what he means is not that he has realised some new possibility of the camera, but' that he has thought up some fresh accessory— balloons, elaborate wall-papers, peacocks' feathers—to include inside the frame, or pome different attitude for his models to adopt.
Not only does Beaton work this way, he has managed to convince himself that it is the way other men of talent worked as well. " Having developed a mania for Early Victorian decoration and collected shell flowers under glass domes, beadwork chairs and mother-of-pearl tables, I always introduCed them into the elaborate snapshots which I took in imitation of the work of Octavius Hill and other pioneers of photography." But if there is one quality which distinguishes the noble work of Hill, it is its stark simplicity, bold massing of light and shade, and rigid exclusion of extraneous interest. Mr. Beaton, however, not only ascribes to Hill his own way of working, he actually divides him into halves, making him Oliver Hill in one place and Octavius Hill in another, and indexing the halves as separate characters.
His writing is equally slap-dash. He can knock off a vivid likenzi., of a model he appreciates: " She had an early Egyptian, cat-like beauty, with the flat curls of a Greek statue ; her body was exotically attenuated, and her poses those of insolent pride." But he is equally capable of writing: "'T'he Princess, with wild-rose complexion, peri- winkle-blue eyes and cool refreshing smile, came in, followed by her nurse holding the precious bundle " ; or " A particularly tenacious reporter from a particularly mischievous morning paper was particu- larly lacking in sensitivity ".; or even " It is the spade-work involved in arranging each sitting that mitigates against the pleasures of photography "—a revealing sentence in more ways than one.
Yet though this is a light-weight and trifling book, one side with the cattiness, too, there is something genuinely good- natured and innocent.
The question before 'Mr. Beaton, I think, is whether he has had enough of it all yet. 11 he has, it may not be beyond his powers —at an age when most men settle cosily down to repetition—to start on an entirely new career, perhaps of a much more serious kind. But he will need to outgrow the small boy, and consign the
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