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Lucy Davies 07 February 2016 6:00am GMT Over the half-century he  was taking photographs, Norman Parkinson produced some of the most memorable fashion images and portraits of our time. The

British photographer, who died in 1990 aged 76, was one of Vogue’s star contributors, and enjoyed a relationship with the magazine that lasted four decades. Jerry Hall and Grace Coddington

were among the models his images helped to propel to stardom. His unique contribution to the field is  part of the grand survey of Vogue’s fashion photography at the National Portrait

Gallery this month (alongside work by Cecil Beaton, David Bailey et al), and the focus of a boutique show at Eleven Fine Art in London’s Belgravia. ‘Norman Parkinson changed the face of

fashion photography’, says Eleven’s owner, Charlie Phillips. ‘He transformed  it from something staid and static into something exciting and glamorous.’ Parkinson’s flamboyant style of

shooting, which took fashion out of the studio and into the fresh air and real life, captured a spirit of spontaneity that changed the way we look at clothes. ‘I wanted to take the

scent-laden atmosphere out of photographs,’ he once said. Described as ‘a bit flash’ by his rival Cecil Beaton, ‘Parks’, as he was known to Vogue staff, was never shy or retiring. From the

beginning, he cultivated an ‘exaggerated personal style,’ says National Portrait Gallery curator Robin Muir. His eccentricities included a large white last-days-of-the-Empire moustache and

Victorian smoking cap, made all the more striking by the fact he was 6ft 5in. Muir, who met Parks in the foyer at Vogue House when he was assistant editor of Condé Nast books in the

mid-1980s, says, ‘He was very gallant, but I got the sense he was acting the part of the Gentleman Fashion Photographer. 'He was the antithesis of Irving Penn [who never wanted his

sitters to feel relaxed in front of the camera]. Instead, he lavished charm on his subjects. He wanted them to enjoy the experience – that’s how he got his photographs.’  ‘I used to have

such fun with him,’ says Twiggy, who posed for Parkinson many times in the late 1960s and early 1970s. ‘Those eccentricities made him a delight to be with.’ She was so taken with him that,

in 1978, pregnant with her daughter Carly, she chose him to take her picture. ‘I have them framed at home,’ she says. ‘They’re among my most treasured photos.’  “He taught me everything I

know. I adored him” Grace Coddington Born Ronald William Parkinson Smith in 1913, the middle son of a barrister, Parkinson learnt his trade at the studios of Speaight and Sons, court

photographers of New Bond Street. In 1934, aged 21, he opened his own studio at 1 Dover Street, Piccadilly, with another ex-employee of Speaight, Norman Kibblewhite. The pair combined their

names to call the enterprise the Norman Parkinson Studio. Having been weaned  on Speaight and Sons’ staid portraiture, Parkinson went rather wild, luring debutantes to his studio with

promises of  a ride in his four-seater tourer. However,  the partnership didn’t last more than a few months and, when Kibblewhite upped sticks, Parks carried on by himself, adopting the

business name as his own.   It was in Dover Street that his work came to the attention of an editor at Harper’s Bazaar magazine, who stumbled across it while visiting another photographer in

the same building. Once on their payroll, the magazine was keen he photographed outdoors, which initially filled him with horror. He soon got used to working away from the comfort of the

studio, though, and by the late 1930s was as likely to be found in Le Touquet in northern France as in London’s Hyde Park. Parkinson observed that, in the mid-1930s, ‘Most photographers

showed women standing in scintillating salons with their knees bolted... I never knew any girls with bolted knees. ‘I only knew girls that jumped and ran. So I started to photograph these

girls. Everyone said, “How bold!”’  His tenure at Vogue began in 1941, aged 28, following a stint as a war pilot – ‘doing reconnaissance, that sort of thing,’ he would claim, although the

details of his actual contribution remain vague. However, his work for Vogue, chiefly a series of rural vignettes describing what was going on in the British countryside, ‘was vital to the

war effort,’ says Muir. ‘At the time, lots of magazines folded because of paper rationing, but Vogue was allowed to survive, and actually given extra paper, because it was considered good

for morale. And with  so many good photographers like Cecil Beaton and Lee Miller in Europe, the editor needed Parkinson here in England.’  After the war, Parkinson was one of the first

photographers to take advantage of the beginnings of jet travel, and subsequently one of the earliest to use foreign locations. On a trip to India in 1956, he produced  a groundbreaking set

of fashion images published under the headline ‘Winter sunshine wardrobe in India’, showing models floating on riverboats in Kashmir and mixing with the locals at the Taj Mahal. As well as

their keen eye for pattern, the images are remarkable for their shades of magenta, fuchsia and rose. “He lavished charm on his subjects. He wanted them to enjoy the experience – that’s how

he got his photographs”  Robin Muir ‘How clever  of you, Parks, to know that pink is the  navy blue of India,’ said Diana Vreeland, then fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar.   His personal

life merged with his professional obligations when he married his third wife, actress Wenda Rogerson,  in 1947 (he had already divorced twice: Margaret Banks in 1940 and Thelma Woolley soon

after the war). He had one son, Simon, with Wenda and she became his muse, featuring in many of his images  for Vogue – draped over the bonnet of a Rolls-Royce, even riding an ostrich. He

said she represented, ‘A quiet beauty… frozen, permanent, it does not age.’ In this halcyon post-war period, Parkinson’s images neatly captured the idea of the sporty, open-minded girl with

whom a generation of young women, buoyed by the wisecracks  of Katharine Hepburn andJean Harlow, felt a connection. And designers such as Chanel and Schiaparelli couldn’t get enough,

insisting he contribute to every collection. The secret ingredient of these fabulous tableaux was the cheeky charm he lavished on his favourite models, such as Jerry Hall and Carmen

Dell’Orefice. Jan de Villeneuve remembers being ‘perched on the Grand Canyon for one set of pictures, hanging off the Golden Gate Bridge for another. It was dangerous, but you’d do it for

him.’  But Parks wasn’t nice to everyone. John Swannell, now a fashion, celebrity and royal photographer in his own right, used to assist Parkinson at Vogue in the 1960s. ‘He was really

flamboyant and knew he was at the top of the pecking order. But he was also very arrogant. ‘I think by then he was jealous of [David] Bailey, this young spark who had recently arrived on the

scene and was really shaking things up. It put his nose out of joint and sometimes made him very unkind. I remember him sending models that weren’t to his taste packing, telling them they

would never make it in the business.’ Parks left Vogue for its rival, Queen magazine, in 1959, where he became creatively infatuated with model Celia Hammond, whom he discovered. He shot 

her in the driving seat of a sports car, hair  in the wind, and liked, he said, that she was ‘punctual and hard-working’. Four years later, at the top of his game (and largely to avoid tax

on his considerable earnings), he and Wenda moved to Tobago, where he began rearing pigs (his Porkinson Bangers have been served at The Ritz). He returned to Vogue the following year, where

he worked almost exclusively until 1978.  It was during this period that he took his famous pictures of Jerry Hall, including the shot on page 31 where she cradles a phone between her ear

and an ocean-blue swim-hat – this made the cover in 1975. That year, he also pictured Hall standing on various monuments in the Soviet Union, usually accented with the communist colour red.

Allegedly Parkinson, Hall and Vogue’s Grace Coddington, then a stylist, eluded KGB bugs by planning shoots in his hotel bathroom, taps running. ‘Other photographers didn’t have that wit or

looseness, they were much more rigid,’ said Coddington in 2013. ‘He taught me everything I know – I always say he’s my number one mentor. I adored him.’  But mostly, these later years were

dominated by his royal portraits, which were remarkably informal. Muir says  that by the time he was appointed official photographer for Princess Anne’s wedding in 1973, he’d even supplanted

Beaton as the Palace’s portraitist of choice. Parkinson left Vogue in 1978 and lived out his dotage shooting for Town & Country.  At Parkinson’s 70th birthday party, held in Manhattan,

guests included Koo Stark, the Duke of Marlborough, Iman and Jerry Hall. It was covered by The New Yorker, proving that, after half a century in the business,  he was as big a figure in the

fashion world  as the people he’d dedicated his life to photographing. He had a dim view of retirement, and kept working until the  end, dying while on assignment for Town  & Country in

1990 following a cerebral haemorrhage. He once said he wished  his obituary to read: ‘He took photography out of the embalming trade and, for a time, the open shutter of his camera was a

window to the shimmer of a vanishing England.’ All things considered, it would  be churlish to disagree.