‘It’s always about the next picture’

And there’s always the next show. Bailey, along with his wife, Catherine, and son Fenton, who works at Bailey’s studio managing/producing as well as being a photographer in his own right, have been poring through the archive, scanning 3,000 potential pictures to find the most iconic fashion images from the 1960s and 1970s. The mission was to select 200 that would form an exhibition, David Bailey’s Changing Fashion, for Marta Ortega Pérez’s MOP Foundation in La Coruña, Spain, which opened yesterday. “There weren’t any embarrassments. Bailey doesn’t do embarrassment,” Catherine says with a laugh of the editing process. She should know — the former model has been married to him for almost four decades.

Ortega Perez, the non-executive chairwoman of Inditex (Zara is the best-known brand in its stable) is highly versed in fashion and fascinated by the process of image-making. The Marta Ortega Pérez (MOP) Foundation, established three years ago, has become an acclaimed centre for photography and previous exhibitions have been devoted to Peter Lindbergh, Helmut Newton and Irving Penn. Pérez approached Bailey last year. “As Diana Vreeland once said, ‘Irving Penn’s studio is like a cathedral. David Bailey’s is like a nightclub.’ But make no mistake, Bailey is an artist who takes what he does very, very seriously,” Pérez says. “His creative process is driven by his relentless energy, by the constant need to challenge both his audience and the people with whom he works. Kate Moss spoke for generations of models and collaborators when she described working with Bailey as like ‘catching lightning in a bottle’.”

Catherine, who began modelling for Bailey in the 1980s, is tuned into that “lightning” which still strikes despite his compromised health: he has vascular dementia, which affects his mobility and memory. “Even in the editing process, he had a million ideas, additions and changes. Yes, there have been arguments and disagreements over what makes the cut, but we are all trying to get things seen that haven’t been seen.”

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“There’s a series of nudes, a short film edited from unseen footage and new portraits based on the original Box of Pin-Ups [Bailey’s iconic 1965 portfolio of 36 portraits of London’s glitterati ranging from Mick Jagger to Michael Caine and Cecil Beaton],” Fenton explains. Bailey has gone about shooting a new series for this exhibition with a roll call of stars including Rod Stewart, David Beckham and Kate Moss. “I’m always thinking about the next picture, the one I haven’t taken yet,’ he tells me over email. “The new Box of Pin-Ups mixes people I admire today with some familiar faces from the past. It’s a continuation, not a repeat.”

Catherine believes his process is fundamentally instinctive. “He always says that as soon as a subject enters the room, that person becomes the centre of his world while he’s photographing them. He’s either prodding them with compliments and being incredibly nice, or somebody might need a little bit of a poke. It’s just the way he works and how he gets a reaction, a connection.

“Someone might think they can copy a David Bailey portrait, but they can’t,” she adds. His lighting, known as “Bailey lighting”, is characteristically direct and stripped back to get to that person in that moment. “For him the portrait is everything, whether it’s of a person, a room or a landscape,” Fenton says.

Bailey is a fearsome yet playful presence on a shoot. “I treat everyone the same whether it’s a model, a rock star or a stranger,” he says. “It’s always about the person, not the role they play. And I always listen to the models because they know how they look best. I wouldn’t tell Jerry Hall how to look.”

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While I was working as fashion features director of British Vogue, where Bailey was on contract, we did several sittings. “Who the f*** are you?” I remember his greeting on one occasion as I stepped into his Brownlow Mews studio where we were shooting Alexander McQueen stripped back to his vest and jeans. The two Eastenders were like brothers. On joining the crew at a shoot and interview in Paris at Marc Jacobs’s apartment he hollered, “You’re looking foxy!” bursting into a smile as pronounced as my blush. It often felt like he saw right through you with those ever alert eyes. Although highly instinctive, in the lead-up to a shoot Bailey always requested deep research on his subject. He is fascinated by people and figuring out what makes them tick.

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“To this day he remains impervious to the superficial allure of fame and fascinated by the humdrum beauty of the everyday,” Pérez says. “For his first international assignment he insisted on working with the then unknown Jean Shrimpton, whose ‘ordinary beauty’ has captivated him ever since.”

Unlike the “dirty real” photographers who emerged in the 1990s who took his baton and ran with it, shooting models in bedsits and grungy clothes, Bailey wanted to capture the beauty and energy in women. That might be in the vibrant leaping and jumping images he made on the streets of Manhattan in the 1960s for Diana Vreeland’s American Vogue or more classical studies like beach siren Marie Helvin looking out to sea in the 1970s.

And in the case of Shrimpton, Catherine Deneuve and Helvin, Bailey went on to date or marry them. Catherine Bailey met her future husband at a studio in London. “It was him and Terence Donovan. They were sitting in the reception, just sizing everybody up, having a laugh, and then Bailey came and chatted to me. I was working with another photographer and then I started working with him after that basically. He was very charismatic and cheeky. I liked him. You can’t not like him,” she says, laughing. They shot for Italian Vogue travelling the world on trips that, back then, might last two weeks. “He works hard, and he expects everyone else to. You get on with it, you do it and no moaning! I was lucky going to all these incredible places.”

But working with family has its prickly patches. “You fight, you love each other, you stick up for each other and do everything together,” Catherine says. The Baileys have literally hundreds of family photo albums charting all those decades. An equipment and tech (high and low) junkie, Bailey used to run down to Snappy Snaps with a first-generation disposable camera to have his family pictures developed. “He’d do shoots on those as well. The only thing he doesn’t really like using to take pictures is the iPhone,” Fenton says. At Changing Fashion there are also cabinets of paraphernalia and memorabilia including contact sheets, contracts and correspondence, and piles of equipment that give a glimpse behind the scenes.

So what advice does David Bailey have for budding photographers in today’s image-saturated world? “You might think you know better than everyone, but don’t act like it —because you might have to prove it.”

David Bailey’s Changing Fashion is at the MOP Foundation, Muelle de Bateria, La Coruña, until September 14, themopfoundation.org