Portraits in Fashion: Norman Parkinson

This impressive examination of an unrivaled 20th-century photographic portfolio is filled with original color photographs and black-and-white prints from Parkinson's own archives

From his first outdoor fashion shoot in 1935, Norman Parkinson’s “moving pictures taken with a still camera” brought glamor and inventiveness to fashion photography. He set the New Look against the New York skyline, Quant dresses in swinging London, and Calvin Klein and Krizia in exotic locations from Tahiti to Tobago. “If a girl looks like a model, she is not for my lens,” said “Parks.” He wanted energy and individuality, and found it in “top girls” like Wenda, the willowy actress he married in 1947, Celia Hammond, Jerry Hall, Iman, and Appollonia van Ravenstein. Parkinson’s long association with Vogue, and his numerous assignments for Harper’s Bazaar, Queen, and other international magazines, brought him fame and recognition. In return he gave the fashion world ineffable style and unforgettable images.

Robin Muir is a curator and writer on photography. He has curated major exhibitions of work by John Deakin, Michael Cooper, and Terence Donovan, as well as the Snowdon Retrospective. He has also mounted several collections of fashion photography drawn from the archives of Vogue, for which he worked as a picture editor. He is the author of A Maverick Eye: The Street Photography of John Deakin Unseen Vogue: The Secret History of Fashion Photography.