A Tale of Two Cities: John Deakin – Genoa, and Johnnie Shand Kydd – Naples

Opening Reception Thursday 10 November, 6 – 8pm

In his lifetime John Deakin (1916-72) achieved notoriety for his portraits for Vogue of the leading figures of early post war cultural life – from Dylan Thomas to Humphrey Bogart, Maria Callas to John Huston. Vogue might have expected flattering likenesses but Deakin instead provided unretouched and pitiless documents. It was a short-lived relationship for the lure of the pubs and clubs of London’s West End, conveniently close to Vogue’s studios, ultimately claimed him. And in so doing, Deakin’s lasting fame became instead for his portraits of the artists of the 1950s, specifically those who congregated there and contributed to the myth and the reality of a ‘Soho bohemia’. Chief among these figures were Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, the luckless John Minton and the ill-starred ‘Two Roberts’, Colquhoun and MacBryde.

When Johnnie Shand Kydd’s dispassionate survey of the new artistic bohemia of the 1990s, the ‘Young British Artists’ mostly at play – Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Tracy Emin, Sarah Lucas, Sam Taylor Wood and Jay Jopling – burst onto the scene, the parallels were clear, at least in the broadest sense. Like Deakin, Shand Kydd was as much a participant in the fin-de-siecle revels as their recorder. (Much of which occurred in the Colony Room, a favourite haunt of Deakin’s some 40 years before). Shand Kydd was more sympathetic to his subjects, Deakin a merciless eye. There is much to enjoy in the younger photographer’s work, a palpable sense of belonging to something vital and when to be young and talented and clever was enough; there is little in Deakin’s portraits to raise much of a smile. Both photographers shared an affinity with Italy, whence Shand Kydd frequently returns. Deakin made a book of street photographs of Rome, where he lived for several years after leaving Vogue, and then travelled to Genoa to document for an unpublished book the Italsider steel works. On display are fragments from that unrealised project. Shand Kydd has chosen Naples as his arena and taken from it exuberant slices of life, joyful, sad, highly-charged and off-kilter.