CECIL BEATON
Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton (1904–1980, born London, England) was a British photographer, designer, and diarist whose six-decade career produced some of the most elegant and enduring portrait and fashion images of the twentieth century. Born into a middle-class London family, Beaton was largely self-taught as a photographer, developing his practice through an obsessive study of beauty and society that would sustain his work from the 1920s through to the 1970s. He launched his career with a solo exhibition in London in 1926 that won him an immediate contract with Vogue, where he would work for the next thirty years, shooting for the British, American, and French editions and establishing himself as the foremost fashion and portrait photographer of his generation.
Over the course of his career Beaton photographed virtually every significant figure of the twentieth century, from Coco Chanel, Audrey Hepburn, and Marilyn Monroe to Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, and Mick Jagger. During the Second World War he served as a photographer for the British Ministry of Information, documenting the Blitz and the fighting in Africa and East Asia with a seriousness of purpose that stood in sharp contrast to the glamour of his pre-war work. He became the official Royal photographer in 1939 following a celebrated sitting with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace, and photographed the Royal Family across four subsequent decades. Beyond photography, he won three Academy Awards for his costume and set design, most notably for My Fair Lady in 1964.
Beaton was knighted in 1972. His work is held in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Imperial War Museum, London.