The MOP presents the first retrospective of David Bailey in a stunning setting. David Bailey’s Changing Fashion is a landmark exhibition celebrating the transformational impact of Bailey’s photography in the 1960s and 1970s.
Trading the posed studio environment for the gritty reality of the streets, Bailey took the fashion world by storm. His work with his first great muse, Jean Shrimpton, set the revolutionary tone for the decade to come. Bailey is a master of musical portraiture. An enthusiastic trumpet player in his youth, he has an instinctive understanding of what makes musicians tick. His earliest images of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones capture precisely the differences between the bands. In Martin Harrison’s words, “The Stones loose and cavalier, Beatles buttoned up and controlled.” His early work with both bands laid the foundation for the British invasion of New York.
Bailey became not only the preeminent photographer at Vogue but a celebrity in his own right. His celebrated Box of Pin-ups (1965), which forms the centerpiece of the exhibition, is an essay on the transitory nature of fame. Bailey photographed each of his 36 sitters in tightly cropped head-and-shoulders shots against a harshly lit white background. Box of Pin-ups is Bailey’s defining contribution to 1960s photography.
As the sixties drew to a close, Bailey had been Vogue’s leading photographer for a decade. His refusal to be limited to a single style or format turned out to be his greatest strength. There’s a freedom and informality about his 70s portraits. Marie Helvin was the catalyst for an important change in Bailey’s photography. “Marie changed my style of taking pictures… I began experimenting with nudes, with the body.”
The exhibition is a compelling portrait of an artist who defined the visual language of the 1960s and 1970s and has continuously reinvented himself through experimentation and technical innovation — a photographer who, in Damien Hirst’s words, “defined the world around him for the last fifty years.”
For those who can’t make it to Spain — the Fondation is publishing a picture book to accompany the exhibition: Published by MOP Books to accompany David Bailey’s Changing Fashion, this book is a powerful reminder that Bailey is a master of a unique visual language. The 176 featured photographs trace Bailey’s impressive career — from his beginnings in London’s East End to his later portraits. The focus, however, is on the 1960s and 1970s — two decades of groundbreaking imagery in which Bailey rewrote the rules and forever changed fashion photography. In doing so, he captured the fragile glamour of the era, empowered an entire generation, and brought smiles to the faces of a world still recovering from the ravages of war.
About - The Marta Ortega Pérez Foundation was founded in 2022 in A Coruña, a port city located on a peninsula in the Galicia region of northwest Spain and the birthplace of the Inditex group. In addition to photography exhibitions featuring great masters such as Peter Lindbergh, Steven Meisel, and Helmut Newton, the MOP Foundation promotes other cultural activities and operates its own bookstore. Admission to the exhibitions is free. Proceeds from the sale of exhibition merchandise support the Future Stories program, which helps young creatives at the beginning of their artistic careers. Each exhibition is accompanied by an educational program led by local artists, designed to bring the works of major photographers into Galician schools to deepen the understanding of their art.