Lord Snowdon’s Work Was About So Much More Than the Royal Family
Lord Snowdon never aspired to "high art," whatever that is. He claimed it was his interest in gadgets that first drew him to cameras, but he wouldn't commit to a career behind the lens until pursuing, then flunking out of, an architecture program. Even then, he flatly refused to acknowledge his work as art.
After the Sunday Times published an investigation he'd worked on with journalist Marjorie Wallace, she recalls him writing to her, "Darling, thank you so much for the words. I just take the snaps."
This attitude may have been a holdover from the very beginning of his career, when he was just Antony Armstrong-Jones, an upper-middle-class son of a barrister and a remarried Countess, when he'd document society events at the "grand houses." Back then, explains Robert Muir, a curator and former British Vogue picture editor, event photographers "went round the side, you didn't go through the front door."
Armstrong-Jones eventually found his way to the front door. If he rejected high art, high status was much more up his alley. Snowdon seemed to revel in the notoriety his 1960 marriage to Princess Margaret afforded him. "He made this dimension of royalness into a strange kind of fairy dust," Kinmonth says. And it was sprinkled atop of his already charismatic personality.
His newfound fame as Princess Margaret's husband reinforced something that had already been percolating in the public imagination: the photographer as star. The London creative set in the 1960s had a tendency to treat rising lensmen (sadly, they were mostly men) with the same renown as actors, artists, and filmmakers—even as Snowdon continued to insist, with a grin, that he was just a "snapper."
Snowdon would use status to his advantage in both his life and his work, and after his death in 2017, at the age of 86, he left behind an impressive range of photographs, not just in the royal archives or in the pages of Vogue, but in newspapers and documentary monographs, too.
It's not possible to separate Snowdon's oeuvre from his royal biography—nor would he want that to happen. He knew his reputation was inseparable from that of the Windsors, Kinmonth says, and "it was something he was much more delighted with than disappointed by."
He reveled in the attention it brought. During their undercover investigations, try as Wallace might to slip him in to hotels unnoticed, "when he arrived at the hotel and they hadn't got the red carpet, he would ask for the visitor's book, and then sign with a flourish: Earl of Snowdon."
Trooping the Colour, 1958
By the late ’50s, Antony Armstrong-Jones had established himself as a photographer. He was 28 and had been working at Vogue for two years, having joined the publication after gaining recognition for work he'd shot, documentary-style, on the streets of London.
He liked to catch people off-guard—as he did in 1958, when he was shooting the crowds focused on Buckingham Palace, desperate for a glimpse of the royals. These spectators face away from the Palace and hold up mirrors for a glimpse of something out of their sitelines. The annual Trooping the Colour parade celebrates Queen Elizabeth's birthday, and the royal family customarily waves to the crowds from the balcony. In just a few short years, he'd be up there with them.
Anthony Blunt, 1965
More prescient, even, is his portrait of Anthony Blunt. In 1965, Snowdon composed this image of the Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures—the title for the Royal Collection's head curator—peering through a microfilm, pensive and inscrutable, with one eye obscured in shadow. A couple of decades later, Blunt was outed as a Soviet informer.
"It was just luck," Snowdon once told the Times. "I took it before anyone knew he was a spy."
Snowdon may not have had an inkling of the future scandal, but he nonetheless intuited something about his subject and drew it to the surface. He was famously a perfectionist on set, working to pose his subject just so. He wanted them to look right; he wanted them to look real. And that often took some nudging, if not outright manipulation.
He understood that truth is often best expressed within the boundaries of artifice. Kinmonth watched him do it many times: "create an atmosphere where a person would reveal themselves in front of the camera." Robert Muir, curator and contributing editor to Vogue, noted that he often did so by making the experience "quite difficult for sitters." Rather than help them relax and open up, he'd "slightly irritate" them to bring out what he believed to be their truest likeness.
Queen Elizabeth and Peter Philips, 1978
It's that apparent contradiction between authenticity and contrivance that made Snowdon so well-suited to photograph his new family, as he did with Queen Elizabeth and her grandson Peter Phillips in this 1978 portrait.
Before Snowdon, Cecil Beaton had been the royals' go-to portraitist. Like Snowdon, Beaton was a photographer who himself became the subject of renown, a socialite with an artsy bent who gained access to the most elite circles, a Vogue photographer who turned his lens to the Windsors. But when the Earl of Snowdon began snapping the royals, he did it in a markedly new way.
The painted backgrounds and stoic composition that Beaton had used to mimic centuries of royal portraiture were gone. Snowdon shunned bulky, large-format cameras in favor of newer, lighter ones, allowing him to move and improvise. That, combined with his genuine intimacy with his now-family, allowed him to capture something close to spontaneity.
Close, because the royals had a diminished capacity for informality. "The royal family is photographed so frequently, and certainly by the time that Snowdon began photographing the royals, they were very used to sitting for photographs," Susanna Brown, the V&A's Curator of Photographs, explains. "They cannot help but perform for the camera; they've been so well trained."
Long after his marriage to Princess Margaret ended, Snowdon continued to photograph the royal family. (And for the record, Kinmonth says that despite Tony and Margaret's well-publicized troubles, even after they separated, "they got on like a house on fire.")
Princess Diana, 1991
So when the Princess of Wales came into the fold in the 1980s, that meant photographing her, both for Vogue and for the royal family, starting with the portrait (which you can see here) that was released to the media for use alongside Diana and Prince Charles's engagement announcement. That first portrait depicts a shy fresh-faced debutante. In the next decade and a half, Diana would evolve in front of Snowdon's lens. She'd learn how to perform.
By the time he took the 1991 portrait above, Diana had spent a decade in the spotlight, become a mother to two, and seen her marriage begin to crumble. The woman Snowdon captured is wiser, bolder, but still bright. The light's reflected in her eyes—likely the result of some laborious manipulation on Snowdon's part. He designed his studio with curtains on the ceiling and walls, which assistants would "push around with sticks to change the daylight," Kinmonth says. "He very much liked to work in daylight if he could."
Iman in Arthur Mitchell's Dance Studio, 1984
The Royals were far from the only famous people Snowdon shot—he travelled the wold and shot celebrities all over. On location, as in this photo of Iman, taken in Arthur Mitchell's Harlem dance studio, Snowdon had much less control—but what control he lost in the environment, he gained in access to his subjects. For a photographer so obsessed with perfecting a sitter's pose, working with dancers must have been a dream.
"He had general ascetic sense that made him not want to have an ugly aspect of the picture," Kinmonth says. "He liked to resolve it all to be beautifully composed and as attractive as possible." Not heavily retouched, but "at their best, but as they were. That's why he spent so much time arranging them."
Tina Turner, circa 1985
Snowdon was a photographer who knew what he wanted going into a sitting. For Tina Turner, it seems to have been her joyful, roguish beauty. For his Sunday Times colleague Marjorie Wallace, whom he shot for an article in the Times, he had something different in mind. Having your portrait taken by Snowdon, Wallace says, is a singular experience.
Wallace and Snowdon spent years together reporting on how the disabled and mentally ill lived in Britain, with their families and in institutions—work that would lead Wallace to found SANE (an acronym for Schizophrenia: A National Emergency), an organization for which she still serves as chief executive. They were close friends for decades, and romantically involved for a time after Snowdon's second marriage.
Wallace was used to him shooting like a photojournalist, with just "one small Leica, which he wore round his neck." For her portrait, she visited him at his studio, where he was waiting with his usual equipment. "He'd decided that he would make me look very imperious, a bit like Princess Margaret, I think, on a bad day," Wallace says. "I looked sort of Napoleonic. When I refused to do it, we had a Mexican standoff for three hours." In the end, he got his autocratic silhouette.
Wallace thinks he must have found the whole thing very amusing. "Because I had married a Polish Count, I was a Countess," Wallace says. "I think that's why he photographed me like that. It was his little joke, and he often had little jokes. This was not one I relished."
Still Life, 1992
During his decades at British Vogue, Snowdon gained a stature similar to that of Irving Penn at the American edition. You could "suggest" assignments to him, Muir said, but "you didn't tell him what to do."
Snowdon had eclectic tastes and would agree to unusual assignments. "I asked him once to photograph a toad, which he did very beautifully," Kinmonth said. "And he was just as happy to photograph a toad as he was to photograph a politician or an artist." Apparently, he was fine with fish, too, as he did for the above Vogue shot in 1992.
Richard O'Brien, 1995
Snowdon's uncle, "who he absolutely adored," according to Kinmonth, was the famed stage designer Oliver Messel. It was through him that Snowdon gained an appreciation for theater—an art that he practiced too, in his own way. "He developed this sense of theater being a possible way of finding the truth," Kinmonth explains.
Sometimes, that meant creating a stripped-down image. For Richard O'Brien, the actor best known for cowriting and playing Riff-Raff in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, maybe layering on the gimmicks was a better way to get at his subject's selfhood.
Glenn Close, 1996
Snowdon's heart wasn't in editorial fashion photography—he much preferred portraiture and documentary work—but when he did it, he did it well. In his early days at British Vogue, he developed a style that "poked fun at Vogue’s raison d’etre," Muir says. But it was a subtle pastiche, likely undetectable by the lay magazine reader.
Snowdon gave into Vanity Fair's glamorous dalmation-ification of Glenn Close, despite the fact that he hated splotches and blobs (case in point: he kept his garden green and flowerless so it could serve as an even background). He posed Close elaborately, but had her face remain almost blank. The effect is to let this highly literal art direction be what it is, which is patently—and kind of wonderfully—ridiculous.
It's the same kind of push and pull, admiring and disparaging, that he felt towards all forms of orthodoxy. He always "saw himself enemy of hypocrisy and camp," Wallace says, "and he didn't like people in authority at all." But if they drove by the palace, "he would always sort of nod to see if the Queen was there."
The Queen Mother, 1997
Snowdon continued working almost to the end of his life. He couldn't help himself—he was as committed to photography as he was famously unfaithful to his partners. And his subjects were committed to him, too, posing for him in blue clothing—a simple touch that became Snowdon's sartorial signature. (Usually it was blue shirts, but for the above portrait of the Queen Mother, he seems to have accepted a raincoat.)
Three years after shooting that portrait, Snowdon would be officially inducted into the creative establishment—he could only stave off the high art recognition for so long. The National Portrait Gallery put on a retrospective of his work, forcing Snowdon to review his entire oeuvre with Robin Muir, who curated the exhibition.
Muir recalls Snowdon being most proud of his 1960s series documenting London's rising artists, and his photojournalism for Sunday Times. Maybe once you photograph great artists and people on their deathbeds, Muir muses, "everything in between is a lot less exciting I think."
Muir says the exhibition was a success, even for the snapper. After poring through his own archive for a couple of years, Snowdon decided "that actually, he was a very good photographer."
He also helped to cement the idea of the glamorous photographer, Susanna Brown notes—a concept that's still very much around, and perhaps even more durable than the regal royal. If royalty is like fairy dust, Kinmonth says, "as like the years go by, is becoming less and less and less effective. It's like a drug which you need to administer more and more and more to get the same effect." Today, he thinks, it's almost lost.
Good thing for Snowdon, he had a foot in both camps. Even if one pedestal crashes, his legacy may remain afloat.
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