From his first outdoor fashion shoot in 1935, Norman Parkinson’s ‘moving pictures taken with a still camera’ brought glamour 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 Tabago.

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.

As we celebrate the centenary of Parkinson’s birth today, we thought that we would share with you some insight from writer and curator, Robin Muir:

“His amiability masked a zeal for hard work and despite himself, in the years of his greatest success, his assiduously constructed pictures, whether ‘urbane’ or ‘rustic’, fashion tableau or portrait sitting, tapped into prevalent and almost collective nostalgia for a vanishing way of life. Vogue  did much to foster it. Martin Harrison has discerned it ‘as though the “urbane genes” that encouraged his pursuit of the exotic had caused him to neglect his “rustic” roots, the solid foundation which put the ephemeralities of the fashion world into perspective’. But as Parkinson himself intimated, he was no artist, no matter how fundamentally his crafted pictures reflected his era, though he hoped he might be remembered as ‘a tiny Gainsborough or wretched Reynolds’. He considered himself instead as ‘a talented and instantaneous mechanic’. In the 1980s he wished his obituary to read simply thus: ‘He took photography out of the embalming trade, and for a time, the open shutter of his camera was a window to the shimmer of a vanishing England’. Shortly before he died, he made a lengthier, more judicious and entirely typical self-assessment: ‘I’ve never had a monumental idea that I’m a great photographer or a brilliant artist … it has pleased me enormously that what I do with this silly gadget – this silent machine-gun of the twentieth century – has gleaned me a lot of respect. But if I should give rein to immodesty … I have opinions which are fresh and I am a fountainhead of ideas. Since ninety-nine per cent of my photographs are taken outside the studios, I shall have recorded the pendulum arc of over seventy years. I hope people will realise when they look through all these hundreds of transparencies and negatives that I recorded a large proportion of the twentieth century. That is not unimportant’.”
- from his introduction to Norman Parkinson: Portraits in Fashion

It is certainly not unimportant. Parkinson’s images are not just beautiful, they do not just capture fashion, they capture the history of the twentieth century as well. His historic trip in the seventies to Communist Russia with Jerry Hall dressed in red, Ann Ford captured amid a 1960s street party,  Princess Anne’s wedding to Captain Mark Phillips in 1973 – the list of events he captured that are important to social history could go on and on.

In her foreword to the book, Iman reflects on what makes Parkinson’s images so memorable. She says that they are “marked by the most extraordinary sense of charm and knowing – you can see it in the eyes of the people immortalized in his photos… The personality of his best work is the reason those images still speak to us today.”

As we walked through the centenary exhibition at The Octagon in Bath last week we passed one of Parkinson’s most humorous images, a black and white photograph of an elderly gentlemen squatting on a child’s toy car. Two women already looking at the image burst out laughing. “That’s brilliant,” they said. His images, although  most definitely capturing certain periods of time – the austerity of 1940s Britain, the vibrancy of the 70s and 80s – the personality that shines through them ensures that they remain timeless.