Some portfolios document a moment. Box of Pin-Ups, you might say, built one. When the British photographer David Bailey released a boxed set of 36 portraits in 1965, he wasn't just shooting the people who mattered in London (Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Michael Caine, the Kray twins). He was making the argument, novel at the time, that musicians, models, fashion designers and even criminals belonged in the same visual category as the era's screen idols.
Sixty years on, that argument still holds, which is why art publisher and gallery HENI's new release deserves attention.
The Pin-Ups Contact Sheets, running at HENI Gallery in Soho until July 31, is the first time Bailey's original contact sheets from the project have ever been offered for sale. For a portfolio this heavily reproduced, that's a significant gap being filled: the chance to see the Kodak Tri-X frames either side of the ones that made the cut, the crossing-outs, the grease-pencil circles, the handwritten notes to a printer deciding which face would represent an era.
The release sits across several formats. Alongside the 36 original silver gelatin contact sheets, HENI is offering a first edition of the original Box of Pin-Ups clamshell, a run of Bailey's photographic prints from 1990 to 2009, and two new limited-edition series produced with HENI Editions: four XL archival prints with screenprint detailing, and three smaller screenprints priced at $1,250 each. Everything is by application only, closing at 17:00 BST on July 31.
What they show
For photographers specifically, the value here is less in the finished portraits, more in the process laid bare. A contact sheet, you understand, doesn't lie about how a photographer thinks.
You can see Bailey and his medium-format camera circling back to the same expression on Jagger across a dozen near-identical frames, testing how little a fur hood needs to move before a picture stops being a snapshot and becomes an icon. The Michael Caine sheet, glasses pushed up, cigarette mid-frame, shows the same discipline: shoot the gesture until it's inevitable, then stop.
That's a masterclass in editing as much as shooting, and it's rarely available to study this directly from a photographer of Bailey's stature.
Box of Pin-Ups is also worth revisiting for what it left out. Of the 36 sitters, only four were women, a decision the original text defended bluntly. In the age of Mick Jagger, it argued, it was the boys who'd become the pin-ups.
Whatever you make of that framing six decades on, it's a useful reminder that Bailey wasn't shooting celebrity as a neutral fact. He was shooting a specific, contestable idea of who counted as glamorous in 1965, and doing it with enough conviction that the portfolio became a document of the argument itself, not just its subjects.
Bailey, now 88, discovered photography while serving in the RAF in Singapore, inspired by a single Cartier-Bresson print. That the same eye went on to define an entire decade's visual identity, and that its working notes are only now becoming public, makes this one of the more excitingly rare opportunities on this year's collecting calendar.
David Bailey: The Pin-Ups Contact Sheets runs at HENI Gallery, 6–10 Lexington Street, London, until 31 July. Admission is free; works are available by application.
