David Bailey’s Trouble and Strife (1981)

Bailey is clearly in love, both with taking pictures and with the reality and fantasy of his wife. His photographs of Marie Helvin are impressed with a sensuous subtlety, both intimate and stylish. In some pictures he flaunts his outrageousness; in others he encapsulates the fantasies that project themselves onto this exotic woman, seemingly caught naked by an intruding eye. If glamour is the art of illusion, these photographs show him trying to lay it bare. But Marie emerges exquisite and unscathed, her mystery enhanced by this frank record of the fickle moods of an intimate relationship, the photographs of a private diary. Condition: spotting to endpapers and top edge of text-block.