John Deakin

Pages from the Paris Book Dummy 

Early 1950s

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.

In the small catalogue for his Paris show Elizabeth Smart observed that "You certainly won't feel rested after a time in John Deakin's Paris. These pictures take you by the scruff of the neck and insist that you see. If you have never been to Paris, you will find it haunted when you arrive.... By some alchemy this photographer squeezes his heart through his lens, his pity or impudence egging him on!"

Deakin received critical acclaim for these photographs of Parisian street life. Vogue characterised the Paris photographs as "a painful, monstrously beautiful view of the city that never appeared in any guidebook'. A review by Colin MacInnes in The Times declared that "Mr Deakin has an astonishing eye for the peculiar hidden in the ordinary: where the casual observer sees only a shop-front or the façade of a house, Mr Deakin sees one side of Alice's looking glass, and the infinite mysteries that lie behind it." Art critic David Sylvester wrote in the Listener: "The pictures of Paris by John Deakin present a vision that is profoundly personal and profoundly strange, a vision which confounds and undermines all notions of where inanimate ends and animate takes over."

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.