NORMAN PARKINSON
Norman Parkinson CBE (1913–1990, born London, England) was an English portrait and fashion photographer whose fifty-year career fundamentally transformed British fashion photography and established him as one of the most significant image-makers of the twentieth century. Educated at Westminster School, he began his career in 1931 as an apprentice to the court photographers Speaight and Sons, and in 1934 opened his own studio, quickly establishing a reputation for portraits that moved away from the rigid formality of his predecessors toward a new naturalism and ease. His decision to move his fashion subjects outdoors and into the world, rather than confining them to the studio, was revolutionary in the context of British fashion photography of the 1930s and set a direction for the medium that would be followed by successive generations.
A wartime photographer for the Royal Air Force, Parkinson joined Vogue in the 1940s, where he would work for the next several decades, and became one of the most prolific and beloved contributors in the magazine’s history. In 1969 he became an official Royal photographer, photographing Princess Anne’s nineteenth birthday and the Investiture portrait of the Prince of Wales, and his royal commissions over the subsequent two decades.
Parkinson received the Royal Photographic Society’s Progress Medal, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Society of Magazine Photographers, and a CBE.