These vintage photographs offer a rare insight into one of the central aspects of Deakin's work, his street photographs. In contrast to his celebrated portraits, Robin Muir writes that "Deakin's street photographs appear mostly to have slipped from view... Dan Farson lamented particularly the loss of his series on the 'clochards', the down-and-outs of Paris." Several of these "lost" photographs were recently rediscovered and are now in the Hyman Collection.
Although by the mid 1950s Deakin was a successful fashion and portrait photographer for Vogue magazine, it is significant that it was his Parisian street photography that he chose to present in his first exhibition, John Deakin's Paris at the Archer Gallery in 1956, and that he also attempted to secure a publisher for his Paris photographs. Indeed in his lifetime Deakin's two published books were on London and Rome and, similarly, the only two exhibitions of his photographs were focused not on his portraits but on his urban reportage.The Hyman Collection includes several of these photographs, mounted on cream card, for what must have been a dummy for the proposed Paris book. Two additional spreads are in the collection of the Victoria and Albert museum.