John French
(1907 - 1966)
John French was born in Edmonton, London, England in March, 1907. He studied at the Hornsey School of Art from 1926 to 1927. In 1930, French left London to study painting in Italy. In 1936 he returned to England and found a job as a freelance illustrator for the English newspaper, The Daily Express, where he pioneered a new form of fashion photography of bouncing light from reflector boards to create aesthetically pleasing, low-contract images that would reproduce well on newsprint. French avoided bright tungsten lighting in favor of soft daylight so that most of the details were picked up in the lighter areas of the photos. The stark simplicity of the resulting "high-key" prints not only became his signature, but became a common technique for others and is still widely used today.
French was also the first photographer to really use newspapers as a medium for printing fashion photography. That same year he began working as art director for a photographic studio, Carlton Artists. During World War II French served as an officer in the Grenadier Guards. After the war, French opened his own company and photographic studio, where he worked with major fashion publications: magazines, such as Harper's Bazaar; Vanity Fair; Vogue; The Tatler and Bystander; and The Queen. He also worked for mass market publications such as Picture Post, Weekly illustrated, and major newspapers throughout the 1950s.
French is known for his clear, stylish, uncluttered black and white photographs taken against clean backgrounds. He preferred to work closely with his models, devoting much attention to their posing and his sets. Hands were important in his images, and were always carefully posed; as well as the eyes of his models, often making them look to one side to increase the size of the white area in the image. French worked with some of the world's top models, including Jean Shrimpton, Pauline Stone, Penelope Tree, Twiggy and Barbara Goalen with whom he recorded the youthful and seemingly spontaneous essence of 1960s London.
John French is often overlooked in surveys of British fashion photography of the 1950s and 1960s in favour of his two famous one-time assistants, David Bailey and Terence Donovan, whom he greatly influenced. He was the first photographer to challenge the news print industry to use photographs instead of illustrations with his flawless and iconic images of Hollywood actresses and fashion models. John French’s photographs were elegant, well posed and pristine.
French died of lymphoma at the age of fifty-eight, on July, 1966. After his death the John French's archive was donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, by his widow. French's work was celebrated as part of a major exhibition "The Golden Age of Couture."
