Forever Young

He’s photographed almost everyone who’s anyone and is regarded as one of the most important photographers of the 20^th century. He’s also an exceptional storyteller. From selling trousers to Leonard Cohen, to hanging out with George Harrison at his home in Henley, Richard Young has seen it all. As David Bailey claimed, 'There wouldn’t be celebrities if it weren’t for those pictures.’ Now a selection of Young’s work will to be offered as part of Bonhams’ British. Cool. sale on 25 February in London.

Young, who is best-known for his photographs of star-studded events, was born into a modest Jewish family in 1947. He was raised in Stoke Newington, and his father ran a stall in Berwick Street Market. He left school at the age of fifteen and worked in a menswear boutique, before spending time in Paris and New York. Whilst in New York, Young got an early taste of for being around the stars, whilst manning the reception at Jimi Hendrix’ Electric Lady Studios. His career as a photographer began in the early 1970s.

“I didn’t go to college, I didn’t go to photographic school… it just happened that someone very kindly threw a camera in my hand all those years ago and said to me ‘go and take some pictures’…” he remarks. Young was working in a bookshop on Regent Street at the time. “I didn’t know a thing about photography, I didn’t know the front or the back of the camera, but I lied and said I knew everything.” His first venture did not go to plan – “not one image came out.” However, Young was encouraged to persevere, and six weeks later he got his first world exclusive: a photograph of John Paul Getty III – who had recently had his ear cut off in a notorious kidnapping, and now happened to be staying with one of Young’s friends whilst in London. He took the photographs to the picture desk of The Evening Standard – “You’ve never seen a roll of film leave a desk so quickly,” he notes.

Young would then receive phone calls two or three times a week at the bookshop, asking if he’d “go take some pictures.” On one of those occasions, he was asked to go to The Dorchester, where Elizabeth Taylor was throwing a birthday party for Richard Burton. Young was the only photographer to capture the event – and his photographs of Taylor and Burton kissing, dancing, and cutting the cake, went around the world. “Quite simply, those pictures made me,” he comments, and though at the time, Taylor scolded him and told him to leave, “what came out of it was so beautiful – we became very dear friends, and she would often invite me to things she was doing.” This included when she was made a Dame in 2000 – “That was one of the best days of my life,” he remarks.

It is Young’s ability to get in the room, get the exclusive shot, and leave with the respect of his subject (if not their active friendship) that makes his work so special. By 1976 he had quit his job in the bookshop and was working for David Bailey’s Ritz Magazine. “Bailey would tell me, ‘There’s a party at Mr Chow’s tonight, you’ve got to go,’ – it was just incredible.” As his work for Ritz was unpaid, Young would sell his photographs to The Evening Standard and The Daily Express – “That’s how I made my name” he remarks. “Every morning I would walk into the picture desk, of say, The Daily Express, and I would throw three rolls of black and white film down, and I would say; ‘This is an exclusive party from last night.’ It could be Bianca Jagger, could be Shirley MacLaine, it could be anybody – and they’d go, ‘Oh my god, how do you know about this stuff?’ – ‘Oh’, I said, I can’t tell you that.”

Working for Ritz didn’t just get Young in the room – it increasingly got him a seat at the table. It was as part of an exchange between Ritz and Interview magazine, that Young spent a week at The Factory in New York. “Warhol took me everywhere that week, all the parties… I felt like I was part of the team. We became very good friends, he never said very much, but if he liked you he liked you… I just wish I’d picked up a couple of lithographs.”

However, Young’s privileged access was only part of what increasingly separated him from the newly emerging paparazzi outside. As his face at the party became as recognised as his images in the papers, Young became somewhat famous in his own right – and stars would even occasionally court him to take their picture. Young recalls a particularly memorable request: “It’s 1987, around about October time, and I get a phone call on this phone that’s lying on the passenger seat of my car. I’m thinking; No one has ever rung me on this, I’ve only had it three weeks, who knows my number? So, I picked it up and say hello... ‘Hello Richard, it’s George Harrison’. I go ‘yeah sure, of course it is’… ‘No really, it’s George Harrison, how are you?’ At that point I realise, maybe it is…” Harrison invited Young to take some photographs of him and his family at his home in Henley. “I got down there at 10 o’clock in the morning,” Young recalls, “thinking I’d be there for about an hour at the most, only to leave at 2 o’clock the next morning.” They mainly spoke about music, something Young has a particular passion for – “I have a great fondness for photographing musicians.”

As well as taking striking photographs of Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Frank Zappa, Grace Jones, Freddie Mercury, Patti Smith, and The Sex Pistols, amongst many others, Young also spent time on the road with Chicago, Fleetwood Mac, and Leonard Cohen. The latter he met prior to becoming a photographer – Young sold Cohen a pair of black Gabardine trousers in 1968, when he was working in a menswear shop on the King’s Road. Whilst waiting for alterations, Cohen invited him for a coffee; “We sat for about an hour talking. It ended up with me saying to him that there were certain writers that I had been trying to find in London to read, but they didn’t have their books anywhere.” Young mentioned his desire to read Hermann Hesse – “about a month later this package came to the shop from New York, and there’s four titles by Hermann Hesse, from Leonard Cohen.” It was an interaction Cohen remembered when Young was later sent to photograph him in 1974: “Small world, Cohen said, Yeah I changed direction,” quipped Young.

It is this ability to charm people that is, in part, the key to Young’s success. Elton John commented that Young has ‘become the establishment photographer that everyone feels comfortable with… he’s like a friend, you go to an event and you see Richard and you think, Oh, thank God you’re here’, Vivienne Westwood claimed he has a ‘homely effect’ on events, and Kate Moss even called him ‘Uncle Richard’. He was even made the official photographer of the Vanity Fair Oscars after party. “One thing you can’t be is shy, you have to be right there, open, on the table, talking to these people, being their friend, being nice, being POLITE,” he stresses the word. “Please and thank you are so important – my father taught me that at a very early age. If there’s a door, go through it, they can only turn you back… we’re all the same, we mustn’t look at it as them and us.”

Young describes the immediate moment of pressing the shutter quite simply; “there they are, there I am, let’s do it.” That said, he knows when he’s got a great picture – “You feel it, it’s like it’s going through you… you know when you’re standing there and there’s no other photographer around… and you get that image.” Young, of course, has many great pictures. “If I knew at the time how important all these photographs I took over the last 47 years were going to be, I don’t know how I would have gone about it. But I’m very proud, and very lucky,” Young remarks, “…and we had so much fun doing it.” The shift from the newspaper to the gallery wall, is testament to Young’s impeccable eye – “Other photographers used to say to me, why are you always shooting everything in black and white, why not colour, and I used to say – you wait and see.”

Sasha Thomas is Press Officer at Bonhams

What, to Richard Young, made Britain ‘cool’?

“Twiggy made it cool; The Beatles made it cool; the clubs; the restaurants… the 1960s – people coming through from after the Second World War and for the first time they would see freedom and the world as it should be – fashion; dancing; clubs… Mary Quant; John Stephen; Carnaby Street; all the clubs; the music; The Beatles and The Rolling Stones; The Who… I was part of it, and I was so proud to be part of it. I was working from the age of fifteen in a little boutique in Old Compton Street in Soho, and what I saw from the age of fifteen from 1962 up to… well whenever, was cool.”

And you can certainly add the photographs of Richard Young to that list.

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