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David Steen (British photographer)

David Steen (born 16 February, 1936) is a highly acclaimed, award-winning British photographer. His subjects have included show business stars, sport icons and political heavy hitters.

David Steen’s Early Life
David Steen was born in St Bartholomew's Hospital in the City of London, and is proud to be a Cockney. Much of his childhood was spent in the air-raid shelters of London and, as a result,was poorly schooling.

He hated school, suffered from dyslexia in an age when the learning disability was yet to be widely recognised, and was caned for delivering what his teachers regarded as poor compositions. After failing his 11-plus he was sent to a technical college where he learnt plumbing, carpentry and brick-laying. His main achievement in his schooling years was to win the Islington Schoolboys’ Boxing Championship (1950). His father Edward (Ted) was a meat porter in Smithfield meat market, getting on his bike and leaving home at 4 a.m. His mother Mary was a seamstress who worked during the War for the post office. David has one sister Sheila, who is four years his senior.

The family lived in a council flat in Clerkenwell, ten minutes from Fleet Street. Most of his friends took jobs in the print rooms as it was the nearest industry. Steen says, “Clerkenwell is an old part of London with great character and full of great characters. I love it and still do.”

David Steen: Starting Out
Steen recalls: “One day a woman called Paddy Brosnan went to Smithfields to buy some meat. My dad asked Paddy if there was a job for me. She was the secretary to Tom Hopkinson, the editor of Picture Post. She said I could work for her as an office boy.

"On April 1st, 1951, at the age of 15, I started work. Picture Post carried staff writers and about eight staff photographers. I walked around the office delivering post and doing odd errands for the staff. One day I was in the photographers’ rest room, where they had their lockers, when the picture editor Harry Deverson, came in. He said to one photographer, ‘Come and talk to me about a job in Switzerland,’ and to another photographer, ‘Talk to me about a job in Tokyo’. I had rarely left Clerkenwell, certainly never been abroad. My ears started buzzing, and it was at that precise moment I decided that this photography game was for me. I soon started assisting the photographers.”

One of those photographers, Bert Hardy, took Steen under his wing and treated him like a son. Hardy taught him not just about taking photos but also the importance of punctuality, being smart, wearing clean shoes and, above all, the love of the job.

Between the ages of 15 and 18, when Steen’s friends were going out to pubs and parties, he was out and about, with a borrowed camera taking pictures around London by day and by night. On sunny days mothers would leave their babies in prams outside their homes and, to earn extra money, Steen would borrow a camera, photograph the babies, and have the pictures printed at a chemist shop. He would pay a shilling a print and then knock at the door of the mother and sell her a photo of her baby for two shillings. At the age of 17 he was doing small assignments, and at 18 he undertook his first foreign assignment, travelling to Paris to photograph Otto Preminger. “I stayed at the Georges VI hotel, dined at Maxim’s, and went to the Crazy Horse nightclub. This was the beginning of a great adventure that would last for decades.”

In June 1954 he began National Service, spending the first few months in Germany as an Army photographer. He was then despatched to Egypt where he was promoted to the rank of sergeant. “My mum and dad were very proud.” From his base in Ismialia, Egypt, he was sent by the War Office to cover many stories in the Middle East; Cyprus, Libya, Aden and Somalia. By the time he was de-mobbed (in June 1956) Steen had accomplished an immense amount of travel and photography. He returned to Picture Post, but a year later the magazine ceased publication. “I was heartbroken,” he recalls. But soon he was offered a job as a photographer on Britain’s first newspaper for women, Women’s Sunday Mirror. The publication was started by the legendary Hugh Cudlipp, who gave Steen an assignment to photograph a woman delivering her own baby under hypnosis. “The pictures were amazing; the mother and her husband and me with a Roliflex in a small bedroom in North London. I entered a sequence of nine photos in the Encylopaedia Brittanica Press Photographs of the Year Awards. I won first prize. I was 21, the youngest photographer to win. “

David Steen: The 60s
After that the phone started to ring. One or two newspapers wanted him. He joined the Daily Mail as a feature photographer for one year. “Working on a national newspaper gives you a sense of urgency.” He then joined Queen magazine, which was more the sort of photography he enjoyed: three or four pages to a story. “I needed to get out on my own, so I started to freelance for the Sunday Times colour magazine, the Telegraph magazine, Observer and foreign titles like Paris Match, Stern, Epoca and People. I was then getting big assignments around the world. The 60s were extraordinarily exciting. “ Trained on the maxim ‘every picture tells a story’ he has focused on film stars, actors, criminals, politicians, prime ministers and countless men, women and children going about their everyday lives.

The list of celebrities given the David Steen treatment runs into hundreds. Sean Connery was a favourite (Steen photographed Connery and Roger Moore during the production of most of their Bond movies); Lee Marvin was the most fun assignment (Steen photographed him during the making of what would become a cult film, Point Blank). Steen played his ukulele in a duet with Peter Sellers; suffered mad days and nights with Oliver Reed; fished with Charlie Chaplin; was privy to the sanctum of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s lonely bedroom; lived with Rod Stewart in Los Angeles; and straddled a railway line in Rio with the Great Train robber, Ronnie Biggs.

David Steen’s Photographs of Famous Men
Steen’s other subjects include: Burt Lancaster, John Hurt, Dirk Bogarde, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Robert Mitchum, Richard Harris, Ian Fleming, Orson Welles, John Cleese, Michael Caine, Truman Capote, Noel Coward, Pete Townshend, Lester Piggott, Rudolf Nureyev, James Coburn, Tom Jones, Somerset Maugham, Harold Robbins, Robert Shaw, Brian Epstein, Cliff Richard, Marc Bolan, Peter O’Toole, Bill Wyman, Harrison Ford, Roger Daltrey, Jack Palance, David Niven, Mickey Rooney, Saul Bellow, Evelyn Waugh, Billy Wilder and IAL Diamond, El Cordobes, Jason Robards, Terence Conran, Sammy Davis JR, Graham Hill, Donald Sutherland, Bobby Moore, Ringo Starr, Pierce Brosnan, Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins, James Mason, Sir Ralph Richardson, Tom Stoppard, President Tito, Placido Domingo.

David Steen’s Photographs of Famous Women
Julie Christie, Twiggy, Sophia Loren, Ingrid Bergman, Jane Seymour, Bianca Jagger, Liz Taylor, Britt Ekland.

David Steen’s book: Heroes and Villains
Steen’s book, Heroes and Villains, was published in May, 2005, by Genesis Publications. It contains 100 photographs of famous and infamous men who were photographed by Steen over the years.

Review of Heroes and Villains(from The Spectator)
Ever since David Steen joined Picture Post at the age of 15 he’s been photographing celebrities. This handsome collection of male portraits shows his range. At one end of the spectrum is the cheesy picture of Steven Spielberg with his foot in the mouth of an inflatable rubber shark. At the other, there is the poignant picture of Augustus John in the year before he died, his head bent over clasped hands as though in prayer, alone in the breakfast room of a provincial hotel, in chilly grey natural light. For the former, Steen flew to Los Angeles (even though Spielberg could only give him an hour) and scouted for props. The latter he got by serendipity when, in 1960, he just happened to be staying in the same hotel as John. A quickly snatched opportunity, but the outcome is a tellingly composed picture. Steen, as he tells us in the chatty notes that accompany these pictures, was an autograph-hunting boy who hung around stage doors, and as an adult he adored the fact that his chosen work brought him into regular contact with the immensely famous. But there’s a gently surreal irony to many of these pictures: Terence Stamp, gorgeous in pale linen, chomping on what, at first blush, looks like a large and notably phallic cigar but which is actually a carrot; Harold Macmillan (‘a lonely man’, guesses Steen) pottering in his depressingly frilly bedroom; Rod Stewart leering suggestively down his long nose as he lies back in bed, legs spread beneath a flimsy sheet, as sleek and vain and shameless as the cat nestling in his armpit.

Despite its title, this isn’t a pantheon of heroes, but it is a celebration of manly beauty. David Niven saunters up a beach with tight trunks and a seductive smile (Steen likes to get his subjects undressed). Pete Townshend, thoughtfully dragging on a joint, is dark against a white wall, hieratically upright with pale eyes and hands as carefully disposed as a mediaeval Christ. And where the subject is not himself such a pleasure to the eye, Steen kindly compensates with a stylish setting. Here’s David Frost bisected by the crisp curve of a Sixties ‘Space Age’ chair; Edward Heath framed in a sash-window; Hurricane Higgins sprawled across a snooker table, his little eyes half-hidden by a white fedora — all of them evidence that you don’t need to be a beauty to make a beautiful picture. These are names evocative of a distant past. Steen began his career after the second world war. The pleasures of this volume are as much nostalgic as they are aesthetic. The first picture is of Harold Wilson asleep on a train. It’s a wonderful piece of visual storytelling. The prime minister, in grainy soft-focus, is curled sideways with sweetly childish grace and dwarfed by the (also sleeping but primly upright) commuters beside him. It says a lot about Wilson, the supple modern man alongside these stiff first-class- travelling fogies.

But it is also, to anyone who was alive in Britain in 1963, intensely evocative of that lost world, where trains had armrests upholstered in prickly striped velvet and there were monogrammed antimacassars behind every lolling head. It’s not only the fixtures and fittings that were different when Steen was young. This volume crackles with a kind of brashly ostentatious masculinity that seems almost as quaint as Roger Daltrey’s perm, Freddie Laker’s gold medallion, or the bobble-fringed lampshade next to which Bobby Moore poses in déshabillé. Steen’s arch reference to the dimensions of Nureyev’s ‘manhood’ and his anecdote about the ‘fun-filled days’ he enjoyed in Malibu with Lee Marvin, while the latter got crazy-drunk and fired guns into the surf, are manifestations of a mind-set which now — post-feminism, post the health-club boom — is all but defunct. The pictures are wittily sequenced on the same principle as a game of dominoes, each one having something in common with the one before, and there is a whole run of them showing men smoking. You wouldn’t see that nowadays. Steen is a pro — technically accomplished and unpretentious. The great thing about posing a man in a hammock, he explains, is that it makes a double-page spread, so the photographer gets paid more. His portrait of Peter O’Toole was taken on one of the actor’s bad-tempered days, he recalls, but it is a lovely shot — a profile of O’Toole laughing, that famously lugubrious face lightened and animated. The subject might not be obliging, but Steen still got his picture. There aren’t really any heroes in this book: Steen is palpably too perceptive and level-headed for hero-worship. Nor are there any villains, though Oliver Reed, posing preposterously with his gun, does his best to look like one. But there are 100 fine photographs, intensely redolent of the period that produced them, and still looking good some 40 years on.