In the many obituary notices and tributes that marked her premature death at 48 from a brain tumour, Corinne Day was described repeatedly as the fashion photographer who discovered Kate Moss. For Day, one senses, that would have been the cruellest irony of all. Even in death, she could not shake off the label that, in her short and often turbulent life, she had struggled to transcend.

“Corinne had a very ambivalent relationship with what she had achieved,” says photography curator and writer, Charlotte Cotton, “Nothing was straightforward for her, not the fashion world or the art world that she tentatively moved into in the 90s. She saw the inherent ridiculousness of both and instinctively reacted against it.”

In many ways, then, Day was shadowed by the moment of her greatest good fortune: her spotting of a Polaroid of a gangly Croydon teenager among the files of a London model agency in the spring of 1990. She brought a photograph of the 14-year-old Kate Moss to Phil Bicker, the visionary art director of the Face magazine, then the single most influential style magazine in Europe. Back then, Bicker was busy reinventing British fashion photography as a gritty, altogether less glamorous form. He had gathered a bunch of young and ambitious photographers, including Glen Luchford, David Sims and Nigel Shafran, all of whom became successful in the fashion and art world. Day was perhaps the most temperamental, a feisty, self-taught, model-turned-photographer with attitude to burn.

“It was an exciting time because we were making up the rules as we went along,” says Bicker, now art director of the Magnum photographic agency in New York, “I saw the same thing in Kate as Corinne saw, that she represented something very real: the opposite, in fact, of all the unreal high glamour of fashion. I sent Corinne and stylist, Melanie Ward, down to Camber Sands to do a shoot with her.”

The cover of the July 1990 issue of the Face gained iconic status in the fashion world and beyond. On it, the young Moss, who appears to be wearing no make-up, grins like an excited and slightly gauche teenager from beneath a headdress made of fabric and feathers. The cover line announces “The 3rd Summer of Love” and promises features on the Stone Roses, Daisy Age fashion and psychedelia. The summer – and the decade, and the style-obsessed world in which we now live – had found its face.

Inside, Moss cavorted on Camber Sands in hippy-style clothes, sometimes topless, like a girl who could not quite believe her luck. Bicker is quick to point out that, although the fashion shoot seemed casual and unstyled, it was, in reality, the opposite. “It looked natural and simple but it was carefully constructed to look like that. In fact, as I recall, I sent them down there two or three times until they got it right. Kate hadn’t been modelling for very long but, even in her awkwardness, she had that thing about her that Twiggy had in the 60s, a freshness that matched the times.”

Juergen Teller, one of Corinne Day’s peers, and now the most globally successful photographer of all the young iconoclasts of that time, concurs. “I loved Corinne’s first photographs of Kate. They had that end-of-summer feel and seemed very fresh and almost naive, but in a good way. To me, they were her best photographs.”

Revealingly, neither Kate Moss or her model agency were pleased with the photographs, finding them too raw and unadorned. Day had brought her own experience of being a model into the shoot. She later said, “It was something I just felt so deep inside, being a model and hating the way I was made up. The photographer always made me into someone I wasn’t. I wanted to go in the opposite direction.”

But the next time Corinne Day impinged on the public consciousness, that freshness had been replaced by a darker, harsher vision. In 1993, she photographed Kate Moss for a fashion shoot for British Vogue. In it, the model looked strung out and sad, dressed down in baggy tights and stringy underwear that exacerbated her skinniness. Again, the photographs were a reaction to the glitzy unrealness of the fashion photography that Vogue usually featured, but here the extremity of Day’s vision provoked outrage and hysterical headlines about the glamorisation of anorexia and hard drug use.

The terms “heroin chic” and “grunge fashion” were born and bandied about in the tabloids. By then, the troubled and troublesome photographer had burned too many bridges in the fashion world and, more problematically, was actually living in, and intimately photographing, a bohemian milieu defined by hard drug use.

Diary, the resulting book, which was published in 2001, captures Day and her friends partying recklessly, getting high and coming down. It is, in many ways, a wilfully grim and unrelenting book, unredeemed by the kind of beautiful colour tones and glimpses of redemption that the great confessional photographer, Nan Goldin, one of Day’s influences, brings to her work. Perhaps she was trying too hard to define herself against the reductive term, fashion photographer.

Diary also records the dramatic events of the fateful night in 1996 when Day collapsed in her New York apartment and was rushed to Bellevue hospital. There, she underwent an emergency operation for a brain tumour. She insisted that her boyfriend, Mark Szaszy, photograph her, even in the moments leading up to her surgery. She looks dazed, helpless, disoriented. “To me, photography is about showing us things we don’t normally see,” she said later, “Getting as close as you can to real life.” The book’s final picture is of a beach strewn with beer cans: a glimmer of hope, and yet a tarnished one.

After her initial illness, Corinne Day made an uneasy truce with fashion photography. She abandoned her raw, edgy style for something more traditional in the fashion shoots she did for, among others, Vogue. Her older photographs were exhibited in the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate Modern and even the Saatchi Gallery.

“She was ambivalent about the embrace of the art world, too,” says Cotton, who chose Day’s work for the V&A fashion archive, “Someone like Rankin gave me big 40 x 60 pristine prints of his work, but Corinne was the opposite. I remember going around to her place on Brewer Street and there were piles of prints everywhere. She said, ‘Just take what you want’. I really admired her for that. There was nothing precious or affected about her. The struggle she had was really with herself – how she fitted into the exaggerated worlds of fashion and art.”

Day’s tumour returned in 2008 and a campaign called Save the Day was started by her friends to pay for treatment in a clinic in Arizona. It raised £100,000, much of it from the sale of signed, limited-edition prints, including several of Kate Moss that were signed by the model and the photographer.

“We were all on the same page for while,” says Phil Bicker, who initially saw the chemistry between the two, and created the environment in which it blossomed, “But I think that Corinne knew the Kate pictures would define her as much, if not more, than her other work and she was uncomfortable with that. I remember I once asked her for one of them for a book I was designing about contemporary fashion photography and she said, ‘You can have it to represent you, but not me.’ I thought that was very telling.”

Death, though, has a way of reframing artists in the cultural consciousness; perhaps Corinne Day may yet come to be seen as the great photographer she wished herself to be rather than simply as a great fashion photographer.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/sep/05/corinne-day-photography-kate-moss

I started my book Gun Nation for many reasons. I’d covered a lot of conflict zones and was increasingly aware that the real story wasn’t being told. Most of the weapons I saw in cold-war conflict zones originated in the US, China, or Russia – so I decided to go back to the source. When I looked into the statistics in the US, it was astonishing: about 30,000 people are killed each year by guns. It’s like a civil war. My idea was to look behind the groups that are normally portrayed as the problem: gang members and criminals.

Instead, I wanted to photograph the largely white, middle-class Americans who buy and sell weapons in vast quantities. First I went to a three-day National Rifle Association event in Texas. It was astonishing: a convention centre filled with families, salesmen and thousands of weapons. I started taking pictures, discreetly, but people were suspicious and hostile. So the following day I set up a portrait booth, with a large backdrop and studio lights, and people started queuing up to be photographed.

Next I took the booth to a Dallas gun shop. This man Mike came in to buy ammunition, and I asked if I could take his portrait. It’s the proximity of his gun to the baby that people find so shocking, but he didn’t see it that way. For him, it summed up how he felt about protecting his family. If you look carefully, you can see his finger is under the trigger guard; that’s his idea of safety.

Time magazine wanted to put this on their cover, and asked me to confirm he had signed a “model release” form. I had forms for all the other images in Gun Nation, but I hadn’t thought it was necessary for the portraits. But Time needed it because the cover is considered advertising. I had two weeks to track Mike down. I contacted the gun shop, they put notices up, and soon I had all the gun shops in Dallas looking for him. But no one found him, so Time went with an illustration. Then Mike got in touch. He wanted a framed copy of the photograph.

CV

Born: Uganda, 1965.

Studied: Photography as fine art, Polytechnic of Central London.

High point: “Seeing this image used on placards in an anti-gun demonstration after the Columbine shooting. It made me realise how far an image can reach.”

Top tip: “It’s vital to work on something you care about.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/sep/01/photography-zed-nelson-best-shot#

Backstage at the V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green, east London, curator Esther Lutman is telling me that as a child she wasn’t much of a doll person. “I was a total tomboy,” she says. Strange, then, that among her current duties is the cataloguing of the museum’s 8,000-strong collection of dolls and doll accessories.

Does she like them any more now? I find them unaccountably sinister. She considers the question. “I don’t find them sinister, especially,” she says. “But then sometimes I’ll come across a box of eyeballs, or tiny legs, or real hair wigs and that can be quite creepy.”

Lutman is showing me the museum’s new doll archive: rows of stark grey metal shelves, from which dozens of bisque, wax, wooden and vinyl faces stare out at me blankly (only a tiny proportion of the museum’s collection is on display at any one time). She approaches one particularly horrifying (to me) doll, lying suggestively on its back: a repulsive creature in a party dress that is a couple of feet long and was made in the 1930s. It has articulated legs and arms, so its owner could walk it about the room (move a leg and the arms move robotically in time); it has luxuriant and adult-looking blond curls that I am loath to touch.

Most curiously of all, inside its rosebud mouth is a row of tiny white teeth, pointy and sharp. “It was the teeth that drew Craig to her,” says Lutman.

By Craig, she means Craig Deane, whose uncanny photographic portraits of some of the dolls in the collection will go on display upstairs. Extravagantly lit, blown up to one metre high and composed in the unforgiving style of police mug shots, Deane’s portraits will give visitors a fresh perspective on these presumably once-loved toys.

You gaze at their faces and they’re at once both poignant and menacing, morphing from inanimate object to fully fledged personality in exactly the same way they must have done when they were first given to their now forgotten owners. There is an “adult male” doll called Charles, made in France in around 1862 (in his suit and cravat, he is straight out of Georgette Heyer); a chalk-faced pedlar doll, made in around 1830, possibly by Mrs C White of Milton near Portsmouth (such dolls were given pride of place in drawing rooms around England and kept under glass domes); and a Japanese doll named Koko, which dates from around 1906 (poor Koko has such an odd hairline that it’s impossible not to feel sorry for him; I suspect he will be the hit of the show).

Deane stumbled on the idea for his project by accident. “I was photographing my baby daughter’s favourite doll to test a lens I’d rented and I was fascinated by the results. I realised I’d never really looked at this object we’d given our child. Mankind’s desire to make images and objects in our own likeness stretches back to the dawn of civilisation and, while dolls are toys for children, they are also coveted by adults for their beauty, nostalgic value and historical importance. This project serves as an exploration of this, but it’s also an investigation into the nature of portraiture in photography.”

Does he find the dolls he chose – he photographed 35 – creepy or cuddly? “They’re both, depending on who you ask. I’ve found that adult reactions tend towards fascination and unease. Kids, though, who can fall in love with the strangest and ugliest things, generally see just a nice, big dolly. Suffice to say, I’m looking forward to the feedback.”

My reaction to Deane’s photographs was curious. I found them repugnant, but they also stayed with me. Freud thought the dolls of our childhood were capable of unlocking our most secret fantasies. Maybe so. In my case, these dolls, which belonged to children, long dead, whose fates I do not know, provoked only a sudden rush of memory: my mother’s heavy clay doll, Jean, which she passed on to me (where is Jean? I wish I knew); the coffee-coloured Sasha dolls that belonged to the girl next door and which, unfathomably, I used to covet (I looked on eBay; boy, are these collectible now); and a television series from the 1980s called Maelstrom in which, if I’m right, all sorts of freakiness involving dolls occurred.

I’m like Lutman; I do not think of myself as a doll person. But they obviously got to me somewhere along the way. See this exhibition and you’ll be surprised how spooked you feel.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/aug/29/doll-face-museum-childhood-review

David Hockney once complained that photography was a paltry art because its angle on the world is restricted to what the camera sees at the moment of exposure: unlike painting, a photograph can make no space for time. Tate Britain’s massive and magnificent forthcoming exhibition of Eadweard Muybridge’s work will prove Hockney wrong. Combining artistic vision with scientific analysis, Muybridge showed how an image that paralyses motion can catch the fluency of phenomena. He was one of the great photographic thinkers, whose mind reached ahead from still photography towards the inevitable invention of the cinema, which he anticipated by constructing a gadget called a zoopraxiscope that could animate sequences of images to display mules kicking or nymphs dancing.

Despite his scientific skills, he enjoyed the esoteric mystery of his new medium. Photography writes with light, and in homage to the Greek sun-god Muybridge called himself Helios; the emblem on the business card attached wings to his camera and made it radiate beams, as if the sun were housed in the dark interior of his “Flying Studio”. But the would-be deity was also a shrewd faker, a sly self-inventor – he was born, a little too drably for his own taste, as Edward Muggeridge in Kingston upon Thames – and a busy self-promoter. In between photographic expeditions in the Californian wilderness, Panama and Guatemala, lecture tours of Europe, and experimental sessions to study the movement of trotting ponies, galloping horses and skittish deer, he even managed to commit a murder.

Muybridge’s great achievement was conceptual: he made time visible in space. His studies of locomotion atomise duration into instants. He demonstrates, for instance, what water looks like, second by second, as it is hurled from a bucket by a bizarrely naked female model. With a battery of cameras tripped by electrical switches he captures minute metamorphoses too quick for the blinking human eye. What we see as a sloppy, slurping mess is a rainbow of gravity-defying droplets, then a looped ribbon that twists around itself, next a leaping fish or a slippery mermaid. He seems to have trapped a spirit, compelling wet ectoplasm to solidify in the air – and of course, like many of his Victorian contemporaries, he could do that as well: when photographing the house of a Californian patron, he included the double-exposed ghost of the owner, patrolling the premises to keep an eye on his wife.

Time is a stream, flowing around us and through us, incising lines on faces as it abrades rocks. Almost magically, Muybridge devised ways of enabling us to see that stealthy entropy at work in nature. Time is written into the sedimentary layers of the cliffs he photographed, or computed in the rings of the inconceivably ancient and enormous Californian sequoias. The grandiose vistas he photographed in Yosemite are not only sublime evidence of God’s grandeur or America’s glory, like the same scenes when looked at through the cameras of Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams. Muybridge emphasises the destructive and creative power of water, which over millennia carves tracks through mountains. A lake can pretend to be a placid camera, duplicating and inverting the mountains of Yosemite, but in other moods water is aggressive, able to sculpt stone. Muybridge’s long exposures make waterfalls or surging creeks look like sharpened wedges or blunt-ended mallets, weapons that enforce geological flux.

His analytical eye watches for fault lines and fissures, like the sliver a thousand feet deep that cracks apart Eagle Rock. In his studies of the jagged Californian coast he traces the tectonic rift that will eventually unzip the state and send it drifting out into the ocean. The man perched on the edge of a boulder above a dizzy drop in Contemplation Rock, Glacier Point doesn’t look at all contemplative. He is less a mystic than a Nietzschean superman, anxious to discover whether he can vault over the crevasse; he seems to be about to swing himself out into the void, to test whether the empty air will serve as a trampoline. Muybridge was a daredevil who had himself lowered over precipices by ropes, and ventured on to escarpments where his team of pack-carriers refused to follow.

He followed the advance of the railways that abbreviated time and conquered space as they unified America, but he knew that these technological changes had been anticipated, with epochal gradualness, by nature itself. A glacier in Yosemite, its tracery sharply focused though seen from a remote height, is as implacably regular as the steel tracks being laid by the Union Pacific engineers. Like the railwaymen, Muybridge ignored ecological niceties. He had trees chopped down to improve his sightlines, and occasionally included an axe in the photographs as a token of his interference; developing the negatives, he even moved boulders around for aesthetic effect.

The spoils of this war between culture and nature were heaped up on the hills of San Francisco. Muybridge, appraising the place, was of course not content with partial views. In 1878, positioned on the exclusive summit of Nob Hill, where the railway magnates and goldmine owners had their mansions, he set up a camera that was itself a small skyscraper – a wooden box on a tripod that had to be stabilised to resist the high winds, with heavy, fearfully fragile glass plates fitted inside it – and photographed the whole of the city that sprawled below. The overlapping exposures of his panorama took him a day to complete; laid end to end, they flatten the circular view into a strip that measures more than 17 feet.

Once again, time is included – the time it took Muybridge to piece the gigantic amalgam together, computed by the difference between the sharp noon light of the first plates and the mistier, more diffuse atmosphere of the final ones, and the time it takes our own eyes to saunter down all the diverging streets that lunge into the bay and to take soaring inventory of the shacks, the steeples, the boxy utilitarian offices, the masts of the ships in the harbour and the uncountable industrial chimneys. The time spent building this improbable, precarious place – soon to be toppled by an earthquake, razed by a fire and then built up again – is also made manifest. You can see urban history happening, just as Muybridge lets you see water cavorting as it flies through the air. A house like a shoddy wooden crate inside a paling fence abuts on one of the plutocratic palaces; pavements alternate with dusty stretches of unmade road. A vacant lot is a reminder of unspoiled nature, until you notice that it has been rudely sliced open on one side to be used as a quarry. The rails for the first cable car, its underground tackle of haulage wires holding together the slithery slope of California Street, announce technology’s final assault on this arduous terrain.

All the same, every line of perspective you follow ends in vacuity: glassy water, the depopulated hills across the bay, the milky, featureless sky. And this is a city whose citizens, literally the victims of their own mobility, have blurred into spectres during the exposure. A disembodied eye surveys a depopulated world. In Yosemite we see the world as it was at the beginning; in San Francisco we see the world as it might be after the end.

Muybridge’s work can be, as it is here, spectacularly terrifying. On other occasions – as when he gets a woman costumed as a Greek nymph to walk endlessly up and down stairs holding a teacup so that he can study the locomotive processes involved, or persuades wrestlers to mime sodomy in a set of images that predictably fascinated Francis Bacon – he is either whimsical or frankly weird. His odd self-portraits suggest something of his strangeness. In one he pretends to be harmlessly dozing in an art gallery; in another he appears, abstractly reshaped into a black lump, in a reflecting globe set up in an amusement park. He performed for his own locomotion studies, dressed only in underpants despite his sagacious white beard: imagine Moses exercising at the gym.

Most unsettling of all is a portrait by a colleague in which Muybridge hunches, scowling with paranoia, at the base of a patriarchal sequoia, apparently ready to wriggle into a cavity between its roots. Here the man who wielded the axe resembles a potential axe murderer, and in 1874 he did indeed gun down his wife’s lover. Placed on trial for murder, he first pleaded insanity, then allowed his lawyer to admit his guilt while entreating the jury “to send him forth free to resume that profession which is now his only love”. Art, luckily, mattered more than the piddling strictures of the law, and Muybridge was acquitted. Everyone who goes to the Tate exhibition will be grateful for the miscarriage of justice.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/aug/29/eadweard-muybridge-tate-review

Quite recently, David Bailey decided to make a sculpture of his old friend Andy Warhol. In his studio on Dartmoor, he took a tin can, filled it with beans and then took some more beans to sculpt into the semblance of Warhol’s head. The idea was that the head would seem to spew from the tin, and the resultant sculpture was to be called Dead Andy. Bailey capped the bean head with a blue-rinsed approximation of Warhol’s hairdo and covered the lot in plaster. Then, like a Nigella of sculpture, he left it to set.

“I thought I knew what I was doing,” says one of the world’s most illustrious photographers. “But when I got up in the morning, the thing had exploded. Total fucking disaster, plaster everywhere.”

“Dried beans, the ones you soak overnight, just expand in those conditions,” says Bailey’s wife, Catherine.

“That’s right!” says Bailey. “So I did it again it, but this time with sweets.”

“Jelly beans,” explains Catherine. “They’re about the size of baked beans.”

And, of course, they don’t detonate overnight. Bailey cackles like Dudley Moore, and reaches for another fag. We’re sitting on the terrace of his 13th-century farmhouse on Dartmoor, having a lovely lunch made by Catherine. She is the former model who became Bailey’s fourth wife when she was 22, and he was in his early 40s (the others were Rosemary Bramble, Catherine Deneuve and Marie Helvin). From here, green hills seem to roll away for ever, or at least to Torquay. “Fucking dreadful for my asthma,” complains Bailey. “It’s so damp here.”

So is he working hard? “Harder than ever. I’m 72, but I’m painting, sculpting, making little boxes that the art ponces call cabinets of curiosities, making photographs. I’ve never worked in plaster or clay before, but I’m learning. I love learning new techniques.”

Bailey is certainly busier than most pensioners. He’s just back from Afghanistan, where he was snapping soldiers to raise money for the Help the Heroes charity. He’s putting together two books about Delhi, and expects to mount six exhibitions of his work this year. “All except painting,” he adds. “They want me to put on a painting exhibition, but I said I’ve got enough enemies already.”

He has less compunction about his sculptures. Next month, David Bailey Sculpture + opens at the Pangolin gallery in King’s Cross, London. “In this exhibition,” says the blurb, “Bailey strips away conventional beauty, and instead focuses on the skull that lies beneath the perfect skin once captured by his camera.” You get the idea: Bailey once made Jean Shrimpton into a swinging 60s icon; he once shot the Kray brothers in their murderous pomp; he once captured the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones – but now he’s turning his back on celebrity and going all David Attenborough on us.

‘Yes! Yes! Yes! No. No. Yes!’

“The skull is nature’s sculpture,” he says. “The old ones get this lovely patina.” In the exhibition, new photographs of animal skulls will hang from the walls, surrounding bronze and silver casts made from Bailey’s sculpted maquettes at the gallery’s foundry.

“I’m not a sculptor,” he says. “I’m an image-maker. Did you know I’ve got an Emmy?” For what? “For a 30-second fucking commercial for cancer! It was anti-smoking and had this girl’s face melting from all the tar she was smoking. A woman rang me and said, ‘Are you David Bailey, the director?’ And I said, ‘That’s debatable, love.’ She said, ‘You’re the first non-American to win an Emmy for a commercial.’ And I said, ‘Does the manicurist get one too?’ She got furious. I love Americans, but I’d like them more if they knew when someone’s taking the piss.” He stubs out his cigarette. “But the point is I just make images – the medium is secondary.”

Before seeing Bailey in Dartmoor, I visit the London backroom where his sculptures are currently housed. Many of the works feature skulls, but the one that captivates me is called Adam, a circle-faced figure/assemblage that has a leering expression, and a snake for an arm reaching down to clutch a rudimentary penis. Is the snake’s head pulling the putative plonker, I wonder, or biting it?

According to the catalogue essay, something else is going on: “The vaunted phallicism of the ’shooting’ camera lens is invoked here.” That description makes me think of David Hemmings in the 1966 movie Blow-Up, playing a version of Bailey as he shoots Vanessa Redgrave. Then it makes me think of Mike Myers as Austin Powers, snapping Ivana Humpalot, or some other satirised 60s siren, to this monologue: “Crazy baby. Give me some shoulder. Yes! Yes! Yes! No. No. Yes! And – done. Here you go, luv. I’m spent.” Before chucking the camera, post-coitally, over his shoulder. Vaunted phallicism indeed.

You’ve got a nerve showing sculptures in King’s Cross, I tell Bailey. He looks at me blankly. Round the corner at the Gagosian Gallery, there is Picasso’s Mediterranean Years, a show featuring assemblages and sculptures to which the photographer clearly owes a debt. One of Bailey’s sculptures, called Pretty Woman, is an oil can with a long spout perched on gangly bird’s legs. It looks like a knock-off of one of those Picasso assemblages (a pregnant goat with an exhaust pipe for an anus, for instance).

“I’ve always been an image-maker, and now I’m making images that aren’t photographs,” says Bailey. Fair enough, but the “now” is misleading. Even when he was a little East End scruff, bunking off school, breeding parrots and going on ornithological rambles, he was already an artist, making shoebox-sized cabinets of curiosities like Joseph Cornell’s. “I didn’t know it was art, but I was always making boxes. I’d call them things like Stone I Found in Forest Gate.”

He still makes boxes, with broader ambitions. After lunch, he shows me several, one of which is called America and includes a Confederate flag, a severed green baby’s head and a Mexican stick figure. “It’s about America – abortion, immigration, you know,” he says.

Bailey was born in 1938 in Leytonstone, London, a couple of streets from Hitchcock’s birthplace, and later moved to East Ham. “The only form of art in the East End was the movies. We would go to the pictures with bread and jam sandwiches five or six nights a week to keep warm – it was cheaper than putting on the heating at home, so I saw a lot of films.” In his studio, he shows me a heartfelt painting of Hitler with Mickey Mouse, bearing the caption: “1944 Hitler killed Mickey in Upton Park.” Nearly 70 years on, what the Luftwaffe did to six-year-old David still wrankles. “Hitler bombed Upton Park cinema. I thought he’d killed Mickey and Bambi, the cunt.”

Disney wasn’t little David’s only cultural infusion. “I saw a Picasso in Look magazine when I was 17. I didn’t know what art was before then, and it blew me away. If there’s ever been a bit of revelation in my life, that was it. Picasso showed me there were no rules. A bicycle wheel doesn’t have to be round. He had a simple visual inventiveness, never complicated and never pretentious. That’s what my photographs are about – keeping it simple.

“That’s why I like primitive art. And that’s why I like the blues, which is the only great art form to have come out of America – and it’s really African. Some of those guys only knew four songs. But so what? Express yourself. Keep it simple.”

Four weeks with cannibals

Despite his interest in art, Bailey never went to art school. “They wouldn’t have let me in with my school record, but anyway, I think it would have fucked me up.” Why? “What I do is direct and simple. Not sure art school would have helped me get there.” Instead, he did two years of national service in Malaya. “There’s a picture of me somewhere by my bed in the jungle with a picture of Picasso over it. They would say to me, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ But I was a cockney so I was used to fighting.”

Bailey has collected art, especially tribal masks, since the early 60s. He takes me round the art in his house. “Not many photographs here because it’s too damp,” he says, as we breeze through the living room’s display of masks. “You’re the first journalist I’ve let in. That’s rubbish. That’s rubbish. That’s good. I got that from New Guinea when I spent four weeks with some cannibals. That’s rubbish. That’s rubbish. I’ve got truth-telling Tourette’s, you see. That’s a lovely mask from Benin. That’s rubbish. That’s an Arp, that’s Irving Penn. That’s by my favourite photographer, [Manuel] Bravo.”

We wander into a bedroom. “That’s a dead bear,” he says pointing to the pelt on the bed. “That’s a dead tiger. And that,” he says, pointing to a doll from the second Austin Powers film, “is little me.” Bailey clearly accepts Mike Myers’s back-handed tribute.

It’s time to go. What will you do if the critics give your sculptures a pasting? “I don’t mind if people don’t like my things. I do it for myself nowadays. It’s only a few nutcases who do art for themselves, like Van Gogh. But I’m not going to cut off my ear.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/aug/25/david-bailey

Spectacular 2,000-year-old Hellenistic-style wall paintings have been revealed at the world heritage site of Petra through the expertise of British conservation specialists. The paintings, in a cave complex, had been obscured by centuries of black soot, smoke and greasy substances, as well as graffiti.

Experts from the Courtauld Institute in London have now removed the black grime, uncovering paintings whose “exceptional” artistic quality and sheer beauty are said to be superior even to some of the better Roman paintings at Herculaneum that were inspired by Hellenistic art.

Virtually no Hellenistic paintings survive today, and fragments only hint at antiquity’s lost masterpieces, while revealing little about their colours and composition, so the revelation of these wall paintings in Jordan is all the more significant. They were created by the Nabataeans, who traded extensively with the Greek, Roman and Egyptian empires and whose dominion once stretched from Damascus to the Red Sea, and from Sinai to the Arabian desert.

Such is the naturalistic intricacy of these paintings that the actual species of flowers, birds and insects bursting with life can be identified. They were probably painted in the first century, but may go back further. Professor David Park, an eminent wall paintings expert at the Courtauld, said that the paintings “should make jaws drop”.

At the instigation of the Petra National Trust (PNT), conservation experts Stephen Rickerby and Lisa Shekede restored the paintings to life. The work took three years, and was completed only last week. “The paintings were a real mess,” Rickerby said.

He described what has emerged from the blackened layers as “really exceptional and staggeringly beautiful, with an artistic and technical quality that’s quite unlike anything else”.

Three different vines, grape, ivy and bindweed – all associated with Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of wine – have been identified, while the birds include a demoiselle crane and a Palestine sunbird with luscious colours. The scenes are populated by putti-like figures, one winged child playing a flute while seated in a vine-scroll, others picking fruit and fighting off birds pecking at the grapes. The paintings are exceptional in their sophistication, extensive palette and luxurious materials, including gold leaf.

Petra – the Greek word for “rock” – is one of the world’s most famous archaeological sites, where ancient eastern traditions combine with Hellenistic architecture, with monumental buildings sculpted out of the solid red sandstone. A Unesco world heritage site since 1985, it was the Nabataeans’ capital city, flourishing as an economic and religious centre from the third century BC for some 400 years. Its site, in the Shera mountains, was an important crossroads for Arabia, Egypt and Syria-Phoenicia.

The paintings are not at the main site, but at the less well known canyon of Siq al-Barid in Beidha – nicknamed “Little Petra” – about 5km away. As they are now the most important surviving examples of Nabataean art, they rank among Petra’s most remarkable treasures and are likely to become a major tourist attraction, Rickerby said. They are located within the “biclinium” (dining area), a principal chamber and a recess, where ritual dining is thought to have taken place. The most outstanding painting covers the vault and the walls of the recess.

The site was a retreat for affluent Nabataeans. The surrounding land shows evidence of ancient vineyards and grape-pressing sites, which explains the significance of the paintings’ subject-matter. The Greek historian Strabo conveyed a sense of their wealth when he wrote: “The Nabataeans are a sensible people, and are so much inclined to acquire possessions that they publicly fine anyone who has diminished his possessions.”

Rickerby said: “They show a lot of external influences from the ancient world and are as good as, or better than, some of the Roman paintings you see, for example at Herculaneum… This has immense art-historical importance, reflecting a synthesis of Hellenistic–Roman cultural influences.”

Park said: “Petra is a vast site at the cultural crossroads of the eastern Mediterranean, and among the rock-cut tombs and temples the survival of a fragile wall painting that decorated a dining hall is extraordinary… The quality of the painting is matched by the luxury of its materials, including gilding and translucent glazes. It is the only surviving [in situ] figurative wall painting from the Nabataean civilisation that created Petra.

“It provides an incredibly rare insight into the lifestyle of this ancient and little-known civilisation.”

THE NABATAEANS

Few Nabataean manuscripts survive, but it is through the ancient historians Strabo, Josephus and Diodorus that we know something about them and their culture. Diodorus wrote of a people with diverse characteristics who were “exceptionally fond of freedom”. Strabo described them as “exceedingly well-governed”, with few slaves, banquets with girl singers and “drinking bouts in magnificent style” held by the king, in which “no one drinks more than 11 cupfuls, each time using a different golden cup”.

The Nabataeans were among the most successful merchants of their day, trading in spices, medicines, frankincense, precious jewels and metals. Exotic goods were brought by ship to ports in southern Arabia from India and the far east and taken overland to the Mediterranean. Accusations of a monopoly on many of their goods, brought complaints from the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans when they hiked up their prices.

They first appeared to history in 312BC in a cuneiform inscription, recording their defeat of a Syrian army. Although originally a nomadic people of ancient Arabia, they built the spectacular city of Petra as their capital. Such was its fame in antiquity that it was mentioned in Chinese records, as well as those of ancient Greece, Egypt, Rome and Byzantium. It boasted magnificent buildings and carved facades and piped water throughout the city.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/aug/22/hellenistic-wall-paintings-petra