Barry Lategan
Barry Lategan (1935–2024, born South Africa) was a South African-born British photographer whose fashion and portrait work made him one of the most distinctive and influential image-makers of the 1960s and 1970s London scene. Coming to England in 1955 to study at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, he discovered photography during national service with the Royal Air Force and subsequently trained with Cape Town photographer Ginger Odes before returning to London in the early 1960s to open his own studio.
Lategan’s career was defined by a precise, classically composed aesthetic that set him apart from many of his contemporaries in the swinging London of the mid-1960s. His most celebrated work from this period remains his early photographs of the then unknown Lesley Hornby, later known as Twiggy, which appeared in the Daily Express in 1966 and helped launch her to international fame. Described as the Gainsborough of fashion photography to David Bailey’s Hogarth, Lategan worked regularly for British and Italian Vogue across two decades, producing a body of fashion and portrait work of sustained elegance and technical refinement.
His photographs are held in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, London, among others. He was awarded an Honorary Fellowship by the Royal Photographic Society in 2007.