“Well, I love the photographs. I don’t love the cameras and everything but I love all the pictures and the life that I’ve captured. I mean I see it all the time, every day: we’re always going through the archive and it’s really interesting to me. It just interests me; I’m never bored with it – I should be, but I’m not.” -Terry O’Neill
Terry O’Neill was a beginning photographer when he was sent to photograph the Beatles at Abbey Road.
Start at the top
Terry O’Neill met Brian Fogarty, the star photographer for The Daily Sketch. He needed a younger photographer to go to the airport while he was shooting stars on movie sets. Fogarty was killed in a plane crash a year later. O’Neill took his place at the paper. His picture editor, Len Franklin, said “Why we’ve got you here is we think youth is on the rise in England and is going to change the world… we want you to photograph that.”
O’Neill recalled saying, “Oh, really?” Franklin said, “Yeah. I want you to go down tomorrow,” — It was O’Neill’s first day — “go down to Abbey Road tomorrow and photograph a group called The Beatles.”
“I didn’t know how to work with a group, but because I was a musician myself and the youngest on staff by a decade, I was always the one they’d ask. I took the four young lads outside for better light. That portrait ran in the papers the next day and the paper sold out. That band became the biggest band in the world, the Beatles.” The song they were recording that day was Please, Please Me (opening photo, top row, first image.)
The Rolling Stones
Andrew Loog Oldham saw the photo in The Daily Sketch and called O’Neill to shoot the band he managed: The Rolling Stones. He said, “Terry O’Neill captured us on the street, and that made all the difference. Terry captured the time (opening photo, top row, second image.)”
Terry O’Neill said, “That’s how I got to take all those pictures … That was the start of the whole of my career and when I look back and tell people… I mean, I started at the top and I never looked back.”
He lensed David Bowie and Elton John (opening photo, bottom row, first and second images,) AC/DC and many, many others. He photographed Kate Moss in a black bodystocking in 1993 (opening photo, bottom row, last image.) The photo copies one he made of Marianne Faithfull almost 30 years earlier (opening photo, top row, lower right image.)
Movie stars
Terry O’Neill photographed celebrities, royalty — Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip — and actors. Audrey Hepburn, Nicole Kidman and Clint Eastwood. Newsmakers include Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela.
Bridget Bardot (opening photo, bottom row, third image,) Faye Dunaway and Raquel Welch (opening photo, top row, last two top images) are some more of the many notables who spent time in front of his camera.
Morning after Oscar
Terry O’Neill remembers his photo of Faye Dunaway by the pool the morning after winning an Oscar for her role in the film Network in 1977. He asked her to meet him by the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel if she won. “I told her to bring the Oscar. I always wanted to capture what it felt like the next day. Not the image you’d see in the papers of the star holding up the award with all the lights and cameras, but I wanted to capture the moment it all sinks in, that your asking price has just skyrocketed and you can have any role in the world. I wanted to capture the morning after”
Bridgit Bardot
“It was a windy day and she was standing and waiting to film a scene,” O’Neill said. “I was just wandering around the set, looking for opportunities and taking a few photos here and there. I noticed she kept brushing the hair out of her eyes. I thought if I could get a close-up of that moment—the moment when the wind would blow her trademark hair into her eyes—combined with the cigarette dangling from those lips—I knew it would capture how sexy, strong and wild her image was.”
Contact sheets
Raquel Welch
O’Neill’s agency, Iconic Images, quoted Welch as saying: “I never liked being photographed … until I started working with Terry. [The first time she worked with him] I thought, glancing in his direction, ‘He’s attractive!’ ‘Hey Rocky,’ he smiled. How did he know my nickname? I smiled back and thought, ‘That’s a cool way to break the ice’”
Last words
Terry O’Neill in an interview with The Scotsman talked about the literally millions of images he had made saying, “I look back at all the pictures and I can’t believe the life I’ve had. They’re all memories for me.”
Sources: Digital Camera World, Terry O’Neil Instagram, The Guardian, The New York Times.
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Right time, right place and he did a cracking good job of it along with Bailey, Donovan, Duffy, and more besides.