New holiday looks in the Bahamas, Carmen Dell’Orefice, Vogue cover, July 1959
In 1959, Parkinson traveled to the Bahamas to shoot American model Carmen Dell’Orefice for a Bahamas-themed issue of Vogue. “Take the first right and the second left, the first right, the second left, until I tell you to stop,” he would tell his driver on the first day of a foreign assignment, “until the picture arrives.”
Images in this gallery are selected from
Norman Parkinson: A Very British Glamour, by Louise Barring, Rizzoli, New York, 2009.
COMING AND GOING, Nena von Schlebrugge, modeling Yves Saint Laurent’s first collection for Christian Dior, Vogue, 1958
Parkinson first found Nena at age 16, when she was still attending a Stockholm school in 1958. He soon brought the young model to London, where she posed for Vogue. In 1964, she stopped modeling and married Timothy Leary, a psychologist and writer. “Nena was very removed and unusual,” said Mademoiselle fashion editor Darlene DeSedle. “She was the most beautiful blonde you have ever seen . . . absolutely perfect.”
Celia Hammond, Wetherall advertisement, Paris
“When she [Celia Hammond] started modeling, no one would use her because she was not in the accepted idiom of beauty,” explained Parkinson in Woman’s Mirror in 1964. “She has a very direct and attainable quality. . . she sends a signal through the camera to thousands of people.”
Jump, Pamela Minchin in a Fortnum & Mason swimsuit, Isle of Wight, Harper’s Bazaar, July 1939
Parkinson catches Minchin, wearing a Fortnum & Mason swimsuit with turban and sunglasses, midflight as she leaps off a breakwater onto a beach. “When I pulled that picture out of the soup, it confirmed to me that for the rest of my life I had to be a photographer,” he told Brian Appleyard of The Sunday Times in 1990. “I was absolutely amazed by the magic of it.”
How you’ll look—now till Autumn, Wenda Parkinson in a classic suit in clerical grey by Dorville, grey flannel hat by Simone Mirman, beaver muff by National Fur Co, Vogue, 1952
Parkinson married Wenda in 1947 at a registrar’s office in Cornwall. He bought a George I terraced house with a magnolia tree in Montpelier Row, Twickenham, and later added photographic editing rooms at the back of the garden. The couple would host guests at supper parties for eight and would seat them in eight mismatched 18th-century chairs.
Young velvets, young prices, hat fashions from the roof of the Condé Nast Building on Lexington Avenue, New York, Vogue, 1949
Capturing postwar Manhattan for Vogue, Parkinson shot a quartet of models set against the city skyline for what would become one of his best-known images.
Carmen Dell’Orefice on a crane, in front of The Old Bailey, London, Queen cover, September 1960
“I did it out of professionalism and love for Parks”, a 77-year-old Dell’Orefice recalled in an interview of the stunt that put her on the cover of Queen magazine in September 1960. “There was no safety net, nothing below,” she said, speaking of dangling a couple hundred feet above the ground. “Parks had a great imagination.”
Frillionairess, The Paris Collections, Queen, February 1962
Parkinson claimed a woman always had to be “admired”: “being photographed is a whole section of a woman’s identity.”
Jerry Hall, USSR, Vogue, 1975
Parkinson shot this image as part of a 14-page Vogue fashion story starring 19-year-old Jerry Hall on a 7,000-mile trip across the then-USSR, supervised by Intourist.
Hobnails Inn, Wenda Parkinson in a hand-knit cashmere twinset, Little Washbourne, Vogue, 1951
Constant Lambert, 1950
Parkinson produced a black-and-white series of writers, artists, academics, and film stars commissioned by Siriol Hugh-Jones, Vogue’s features editor from 1947 to 1955.
Dizy, Katherine Pastrie in Nina Ricci coat, Queen, August 1960
Parkinson filled the August 1960 issue of Queen with individual photographs of the Paris collections. French model Katherine Pastrie, in a coat with a black mink collar, stands on top of a French village signpost that reads “Dizy.”
Princess Dmitri of Russia with her Welsh Corgi, The Sketch cover, 4th November 1936
Parkinson’s career received a huge boost in 1936, when Alan McPeake, the art director of the British edition of Harper’s Bazaar, called to offer him a job as a fashion photographer.
Wenda Parkinson in a Hardy Amies suit near Rotten Row, Hyde Park Corner, Vogue, 1951
Wenda described her husband as “an intelligent man who never reads a book.” He called himself “scholastically abysmal.”
