Cecil Beaton.  It’s that first name which pins him to an epoque.  Despite the current fad for old-fashioned forenames, ‘Cecil’ seems to be a step too far for most of today’s parents with its hint of the fop, dandy, boulevardier or popinjay.  Perhaps for that reason I always had Beaton down as a minor talent but a book I picked up recently for a song changed that (right).

It is nearly 300 pages of Beaton’s portrait photographs ranging from the bright young things of the twenties, through the war years, Hollywood of the forties and fifties and then the swinging world of the sixties, consisting of film stars, politicians, artists, socialites and royalty.  The only requirement for a sitter is celebrity. It’s interesting as a sociological record and also as a personal chronicle of those times – especially the years now receding from living memory. Who now remembers the likes of Stephen Tennant, Paula Gellibrand, Daisy Fellowes, Clarissa Churchill – or the soldier below?

It’s funny.  Photographs of the common people, the unknown and unsung, always seem to me to grow in stature as the years pass while those of celebrities seem to shrink.  The only reason a celebrity is photographed is because he or she is well-known.  As the sands of time bury them that celebrity is gone and it seems as though very little is left – as if that glamorous shimmer were nothing more than a trick of the light.  The reason that these ones have survived is not so much due to the standing of the sitter as that of the photographer.

Unlike, say, Jane Bown, the Observer’s great photographic portraitist who often had absolutely no idea whom she was photographing, Cecil had a bat-like radar for social standing and an incurable social ambition.  And he brought something more than his camera to the party because he had sensibility and talent beyond the mere photographic. That gave him a status with the beau monde that a mere photographer would not otherwise have had.  He was a diarist, artist, writer, and set and costume designer and as his reputation grew so he took his own place in the world he was photographing. So these are, above all, the photographs of an insider.

To my eye, the photography ranges from so-so to exceptional: in a career as long as his not every shot could be a winner after all.  But portrait photography must be tough.  You have maybe a few minutes or a little longer to set up something which you hope will be memorable and revealing with little more than the surroundings you find yourself in or the props you may have brought with you - without even thinking of the sitter and their attitude. Here are two of his royal portraits.

The best bit about the book though is that each photograph is accompanied by Beaton’s little pen picture of the sitter.  They can be flattering, adoring even, or waspish and acidic but they are always very well written.  Offhand, I can’t think of another photographer who writes so well.  So you get an insight into what he was trying to achieve with the portrait and you get to know him, Cecil, that little bit better.  Your imagination is activated as your eye darts from text to picture and back again several times, matching the two up.

I eventually give most of my photobooks away but I am keeping this one both for its great examples of the development of the portrait photographer’s art, as a historical record and as a unique example of how photo and word can complement one another to mutual advantage.

Popinjay?  Fop?  Well, he was a man of a certain, now rather outmoded, style but he was from a generation (1904-1980) which didn’t have things easy; and doubtless he needed an image to counterbalance that of his famous sitters.  But in the sixties the photographic mantle was passed on to a new generation with different equipment and a resulting different style. So it is not only Cecil’s name which is vintage but also the style of photograph which forms our visual memory of his age.