Picture London within the Swinging Sixties and also you consider King’s Road boutiques, David Bailey, fashions in Soho espresso bars. Sam Haskins, whose work is about to go up for public sale at Sloane Street Auctions, was one of many photographers whose work helped form the visible language of the Sixties. So it is stunning to be taught that on the time, he wasn’t anyplace close to any of it.
In reality, he crafted Five Girls (1962), Cowboy Kate & Other Stories (1964) and November Girl (1967) – photobooks that formed how a technology of shooters approached the feminine kind – from a studio in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Think about how difficult that will need to have been. Living in London or Paris within the early Sixties, a vogue photographer had companies to name, stylists to rent. None of that existed for Haskins, who was born and raised in South Africa. So he needed to improvise.
Latest Videos FromDigital Camera World
His fashions included ladies who weren’t skilled fashions, serving to give the photographs an unusually pure high quality. He constructed fictional London units from scratch and, for November Girl, even did the make-up himself.
An extended and winding street
None of this was standard, however Haskins had by no means been standard. As a teen he skilled with a travelling circus and was provided work as a trapeze catcher. He then studied artwork at Johannesburg Technical College earlier than including a part-time images course.
In 1949, he travelled to the UK to study at what’s now the London College of Communication, arriving into a city still enduring rationing. He began his career as an advertising photographer back in Johannesburg in 1953. He ran what was probably the first modern freelance advertising studio in Africa, working across everything from still life to industrial, fashion and aerial.
His first exhibition wasn’t fashion at all. Held in a Johannesburg department store in 1960, it paired studio portraits with photographs of dolls made by a teenager named Elisabeth Langsch, who’d go on to become Switzerland’s leading ceramicist.
That love of the odd, offbeat and obscure followed him throughout his career. Even after a move to London in 1968, after Cowboy Kate had sold almost a million copies, he largely kept the mainstream fashion world at arm’s length, preferring advertising clients and his own personal projects, including a 15-calendar collaboration with camera maker Asahi Pentax.
One image from his 1972 book Haskins Posters, a girl’s face superimposed on an apple, was reproduced so widely, he got the nickname “Sam the Apple Man.”
Haskins never properly re-entered mainstream fashion photography until 2002, when he was in his mid-seventies, after a Yves Saint Laurent shoot in Paris led to a fresh run of assignments in London, New York, Paris and Tokyo. He died in 2009, at home in Australia, nine weeks after suffering a stroke on the opening day of what would be his final exhibition. It was a fitting final chapter: still producing and exhibiting new work almost until the end.
Sam Haskins’s personal collection goes to auction at Sloane Street Auctions on 24 September, with live online bidding available via sloanestreetauctions.com.