Barry Lategan: Lensman launched iconic model Twiggy

Barry Lategan’s 1966 photo shoot with a 16-year-old who would become known as Twiggy produced an image that defined an era.

Fashion photographer Barry Lategan in 1999.

“I looked through my camera and this face looked back at me. I just went ‘wow’,” recalled Barry Lategan of the first time he photographed Twiggy.

“I can’t find the adjective to describe it. I think it was the eyes, she had such presence. She was gawky but she had a sort of elegance.”

The photo shoot that followed – Twiggy’s first exposure to a professional photographer’s camera – came to define the Swinging ’60s.

At the time, “Twig the wonder kid”, as David Bowie was later to call her in his song Drive-in Saturday, was a 16-year-old schoolgirl named Lesley Hornby, who lived with her working-class parents in a Neasden semi and who had a Saturday job shampooing in a local hairdressers.

She had been introduced to Lategan by Mayfair celebrity hairdresser Leonard Lewis after visiting his salon in Upper Grosvenor Street and telling him she wanted to be a model. Taken by her wafer-thin silhouette, angelic face, swan-like neck and incongruous Cockney twang, he rang Lategan and asked if he would take some pictures of her at his Baker Street studio.

“She was a skinny young thing with long hair, which was all fizzy and split-ended, but she had such a lovely face,” Lategan recalled. “So I called Leonard and said: ‘I like her but her hair’s a mess’.”

She returned to Lewis’s House of Leonard salon where he spent seven hours giving her a new look with a striking, gamine crop.

“It was amazing: he’d sculpted a little golden cap,” Lategan observed when she returned to be photographed. “At that moment, she turned from a gawky schoolgirl into a cross between an angel and Greta Garbo.”

She was accompanied to the shoot by her boyfriend, Justin de Villeneuve, who at one point told her to “stop biting your nails, Twigs”. When Lategan asked what he had just said, de Villeneuve explained it was a comedic nickname conferred on her by his brother. “If you ever go professional you should call her that,” Lategan told him.

He proceeded to take “loads of photographs, mostly of her looking straight at the camera or with a little quiff on the side of her face and imitating the film stars of the ’30s” and then sent a set of prints to Lewis. “Leonard hung one of the shots in the lobby of his salon,” Twiggy recalled. “I went back to school and that really could have been that.”

However, one of Lewis’s clients was Deirdre McSharry, later the founding editor of Cosmopolitan but at the time fashion editor of the Daily Express. After seeing the photo while having her own hair done, she rang Lategan and asked to see the set and for the girl’s contact details. The following day Lategan’s pictures of her appeared in the Express under the headline “The Face of ’66” and Lesley Hornby became the toast of the fashionistas of Chelsea’s Kings Road.

Lategan’s picture of Twiggy from 1966.

Lategan went on to photograph numerous other models and in particular delighted in championing those with unconventional looks. His models included the likes of Peggy Moffatt, Marie Helvin and Grace Coddington, who once her modelling days were over became an editor at Vogue and directed a steady stream of cover shoots to Lategan, whom she declared to be her favourite ­photographer.

In his use of lighting and composition, Lategan’s shots became celebrated for their painterly quality, and the British Journal of Photography once called him “the Gainsborough of fashion photography” to David Bailey’s Hogarth. When Bailey himself needed his portrait taken, it was revealing that it was to Lategan he turned.

Lategan also worked widely outside the world of fashion and his subjects included Princess Anne, Paul and Linda McCartney, Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Salman Rushdie, who became fascinated by his methods and the symbiotic relationship between photographer and subject. “I remember Barry in a natty beret snapping away during an interview, nodding every time I said something he liked,” the author said. “I began to watch him carefully, becoming dependent on his nods, growing addicted to his approval, performing for him.’”

Barry Lategan was born in 1935 in South Africa and became interested in photography at boarding school when his geography teacher got him to lock the shutter of a camera open all night while it was pointed at the sky and the film recorded the Earth rotating against the stars.

At 20 he moved to Britain to enrol at the Bristol Old Vic’s drama school. His training was put on hold by two years of national service in Germany, during which time he joined an RAF photographic club and learnt to develop and print his own pictures.

Consumed by this new passion, he never resumed his theatrical studies and returned to South Africa, where his mother had found him a job in a photographic studio in Cape Town.

By 1961 he was back in Britain and a few years later set up his own studio. He subsequently moved to America, where he photographed pregnant actor Sharon Tate days before she was murdered by Charles Manson’s followers.

He returned to London in 1989 and in later years developed an interest in what he called street ­photography.

“I’ve spent most of my career photographing beautiful people, with their hair, makeup and designer clothes, in studio lighting. I now enjoy photographing people as they go about their everyday lives, unaware of the camera,” he said.

There was a sad final chapter to his career when in 2015 he appeared in court charged with groping two women he had allegedly scouted for photo shoots. His barrister presented psychiatric evidence to show that he was unfit to stand trial and that the offending acts had occurred as a consequence of brain damage sustained from a fall down a flight of concrete steps several years earlier. He was subsequently sectioned under the Mental Health Act and diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia.

Two marriages, to Lynn Kohlman and later to Charlene Corrigan-Hollis, both ended in divorce. He is survived by son Dylan from his second marriage.

“As a photographer, I watch the inescapable fact of life that is change,” he said before his illness. “Every second, a person changes an expression or their hair moves in the wind. Photography is all about pausing these moments and embalming them.”

Barry Lategan, photographer, born January 7, 1935, died August 11, 2024, aged 89.

The Times