David Bailey and Terry RichardsonLong before Terry Richardson’s overt, unabashedly sexy and borderline-pornographic photographs, were those by David Bailey, Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin. Employing sex as a shock-factor to emulate one of the finest paris escorts in fashion photography is not a recent phenomena and evident in the work of even the most unsuspecting photographers throughout history. Of those photographers, David Bailey is not to be forgotten. A serial-dater of beautiful women (Jean Shrimpton, Penelope Tree and Catherine Deneuve to name a few) and a photographer whose life was somewhat loosely portrayed in the cult classic Blow Up, Bailey’s titillating images coincided with the sexual liberation of Swinging London and second-wave feminism. The contemporary landscape of fashion photography owes much to his seminal work and his photographs are continuously recreated and looked to for inspiration. In particular, Bailey’s 1970 “Shoe in Bikini” was undoubtedly referenced in Terry Richardson’s SS 2009 campaign for Jimmy Choo.

Shoe in Bikini by David Bailey, 1970

Jimmy Choo SS 2009 campaign by Terry Richardson

Jimmy Choo SS 2009 campaign by Terry Richardson

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