Francis Goodman: Back in Focus

Display of work by the fashion and society photographer Francis Goodman at the National Portrait Gallery.

This was an exhibition which showed the end of one era, the 1930s and 1940s, and the start of the next the 1960s so it included people like Gertrude Lawrence and Oliver Messell but also had Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud. I think my favourite was the one of the beautiful young Lucien Freud.

I was also fascinated to see that he’d become a travel photographer and worked extensively for the Barbados Tourist Board.

There were some great quotes from the photographer in the exhibition such as that a fashion photographer needed “a dressmaker’s qualities to understand the dress” and of his travel work “I want to finish the world before it finishes me?”

 

 

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