HONORING CECIL BEATON
“All I want is the best of everything and there’s very little of that left,” Cecil Beaton (1904-1980)
Cecil Beaton was born in 1904 in London and studied at St John’s College, Cambridge. A photographer, a writer, a designer and an illustrator for more than fifty years, he was at the center of the fashion world, society, the theater and film industry.
He was the kid who received a Kodak 3A folding camera for his 11th birthday; the same kid who later became a photographer for British and American Vogue and a costume designer for the films Gigi (1959) and the play and film My Fair Lady (1965), for both of which he received an Academy Award for Costume Design.
Audrey Hepburn
“What is elegance? Soap and Water.”
In 1929 Beaton traveled to New York; by then he was already a fashion photographer. In New York, Beaton was hired by Vogue and, then, Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar.
“He marked his period as if he was the only photographer around,” said Mario Testino. Beaton spent most of his career as a fashion photographer portraying stars and celebrities — Mairilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Bianca Jagger, Greta Garbo, David Hockney, Truman Capote, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, Elizabeth Taylor and Marlene Dietrich, among others — shooting fashion shows, plays, social and royal events, and writing fashion articles.
Inrid Bergman
Greta Garbo
Pablo Picasso
Coco Chanel
In 1939, Beaton was commissioned by Vogue to take a series of pictures of Queen Elizabeth. Through his lens, Queen Elizabeth became Britain’s “fairy Queen,” and the photos were published around the world.
Queen Elisabeth
“The camera will never be invented that could capture or encompass all that he actually sees,” Truman Capote on Cecil Beaton
He published a series of books: The Book of Beauty (1930), Cecil Beaton’s Scrapbook (1937), Cecil Beaton’s New York (1938), and Persona Grata (1953). He also wrote the book British Photographers (1944), a survey on British photographers, and an early autobiography (1951). In 1968, a retrospective of his work was mounted by London’s National Portrait Gallery, and in 1972, he was knighted.
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