George Douglas
George Douglas (8 March 1922 - 28 December 2010) was a photographer
with a phenomenal work rate. For four decades, from the 1940s to the
1970s, "Speedy George" astonished picture editors, colleagues and
his subjects with his non-stop flow of ideas and his determination
to get pictures in the bag and back in the office in double-quick
time.
This relentless focus on his work – and the fact that
he was a remarkable documentary stylist, who could turn his hand to
anything from Hollywood stars to a feature on the Queen's
rat-catcher or Britain's first female chimney sweep – meant that he
amassed a portfolio of diverse pictures. A visit to his Regency home
in Brighton, after a conversation in the street about my camera, led
to a bottle of merlot being uncorked and a two-hour conversation
about Picture Post magazine, Leicas and Rolleiflex cameras as well
as a tour of the framed magazine covers in his hallway.
He
gestured vaguely at a pile of boxes in a back room. "My negatives.
Must sort them out one day." That was in the 1990s. He never did
sort them out, but then, there were thousands of them.
The
photojournalist Thurston Hopkins, who worked with Douglas on Picture
Post magazine in the 1950s, recalled: "Speedy George beat me to
Picture Post by almost a year and by the time I joined the magazine
he was one of its busiest freelances, with a reputation for bringing
in a tricky story almost before Harry Deverson, the fatherly picture
editor, had a chance to complete his briefing. He was in and out of
the office, a man possessed with his work, and with little time to
spare for chatting over coffee. His total of published assignments
was awe-inspiring."
George noted in his diaries that he
covered 99 picture features for Picture Post alone in the 1950s, but
he always had other jobs on as well. Grace Robertson, a photographer
who also worked at Picture Post, remarked on his "wide-ranging
talent, which meant he satisfied magazines as different in style and
content as the story-telling Picture Post, the popular TV Mirror and
the women's magazines wanting the glamorous, iconic images of 1940s
Hollywood". She remembered him as "always gentlemanly in his
relationships, both personal and professional".
George was
born in Rottingdean, East Sussex, but in 1939 moved with his mother
to Dallas, Texas. He trained in aeronautical design engineering,
then worked for the Garrett AiResearch Corporation, in Santa Monica,
California, but his heart was not in it. The Leica camera he bought
from a pawnshop consumed his spare time and once he had sold his
first picture, for $30, he handed in his notice.
He sold his
first photographs to the Los Angeles Times in the 1940s and moved to
Sun Valley, Idaho, in 1948, where he was in charge of photography
for the Sun Valley News Bureau, taking pictures of famous visitors
including Gary Cooper and President Harry Truman. In 1949 he moved
back to LA and began his career as a celebrity photographer with a
picture of Angela Lansbury for Life magazine.
But it was an
English magazine that intrigued him. He noticed that Life
photographers he admired had trained in London on the Picture Post,
which specialised in 35mm photography and a documentary style. "I
knew this was the future and I wanted to work with people who were
making it happen," he wrote.
He set off for England in 1950.
A set of pictures of two children with their pet boa-constrictor got
him through the door and became the first of many assignments he
undertook for Picture Post. He fell "more than a little in love"
with Audrey Hepburn when he spent a fortnight photographing her in
New York as she prepared for the Broadway production of Gigi and
became friends with the novelist Paul Gallico and the actor Peter
Sellers.
In 1956 he photographed Walter de la Mare. The
author, then 83, watched with amusement as George ran about
organising the shoot, and told him: "I envy you – to you I am an old
man, but in my mind I am as young as you are at this moment. With
age, the body becomes a prison; every day the bars get tighter." He
died shortly afterwards. When George himself was 78 he wrote: "That
has affected me since. Now I myself begin to feel the bars and the
jail the body will become."
Picture Post closed in 1957 and
George turned to women's magazines and the TV Mirror. In 1964 the
Beatles asked him to become their photographer on the set of A Hard
Day's Night – Paul McCartney had been impressed by George's
portraits of his then girlfriend Jane Asher – but two weeks at the
Twickenham Studios besieged by screaming teenagers was enough to
persuade George that he was not cut out for pop photography.
In 1970 he returned to California to care for his mother. He and his
wife, Jill Renton, ran an antiques business in LA, then, in 2006,
moved back to England. She survives him.
Any contributions will be
gratefully accepted
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