23 Stunning Fashion Photographs from the 1950s by Norman Parkinson _ Au & Uk vintage

Norman Parkinson (1913–1990) was a celebrated English portrait and fashion photographer. He always maintained he was a craftsman and not an artist. From his early days as a photographer up to his death he remained one of the foremost British portrait and fashion photographers.

Fuschia - for Autumn brilliance, British Vogue, August 1957.

Parkinson’s fame grew once he began working for Harper’s Bazaar (from the mid 1930s) and Vogue (from around 1945). Inspired by the work of Hungarian photographer, Martin Munkácsi, who photographed his models in the open air, Parkinson specialized in a joyful, kinetic brand of fashion photography. His models were often outside, playing golf, riding in speedboats, jumping and even, in one famous case, riding an ostrich.
Before Parkinson’s arrival at British Vogue in the early 1930s, the magazine, in the infancy of color photography, had relied on imported photographers from Europe and America, and on material borrowed from its American sister publication. Though this would continue out of necessity during the war years, Parkinson’s English pastoralism gave British Vogue a distinct identity. Parkinson’s first photograph for Vogue was taken in the countryside in 1941; a fashion shot of a utilitarian cycling outfit. Followed swiftly by two spreads entitled ‘The Freedom of the Farm’, this was the start of an association that would last, with a five-year break in the 1960s, until it was terminated in 1978 in a dispute over copyright.

To add to the glamour, many of Parkinson’s shoots were set abroad, often in Africa or the Caribbean – he even moved to live in Tobago in 1963. This lent his work an exotic, jet-set appeal that was very popular in Britain, particularly during the austere 1950s.