Terence Donovan

Terence Donovan was an English photographer and film director, noted for his fashion photography of the 1960s. A critically acclaimed book of his fashion work, Terence Donovan Fashion, was published by London publisher Art / Books in 2012. He also directed many TV commercials and oversaw the music video to Robert Palmer's Addicted to Love and Simply Irresistible.

Terence Donovan’s rise to prominence in the early 1960s, together with like-minded contemporaries David Bailey and Brian Duffy, signalled a fresh approach to fashion photography. It became less formal and studio-bound, and models who were previously depicted as remote and aloof were now more like the girl in the street.

Like Bailey and Duffy, Donovan was a working-class Londoner. He was born in Stepney in 1936 and his father was a long-distance lorry driver. He attended numerous schools for short periods and spent most of the years during the Second World War travelling around the UK in his father’s lorry. At the age of 11, following in his uncle’s footsteps in the printing business, he began a part-time apprenticeship in lithography.

His talent was established early on when, in 1953, he won a medal at the Bethnal Green camera club for a picture he had taken two years earlier.

Donovan studied block making at the London School of Photo-Engraving and Lithography, and at the age of 15 began working for block-making company Gee and Watson as a photographer’s assistant. Here he discovered that photography, rather than printing, was his true passion.

Donovan was noted for his technical mastery of the medium as well as his visual creativity. He had a relaxed but professional manner with his subjects, whether fashion models or royalty, and kept up a steady stream of banter while photographing.

During the ’80s, Donovan was also popular as a celebrity and royal portrait photographer. He shot formal portraits of Princess Diana in three separate sittings, as well as the Duke and Duchess of York and Margaret Thatcher when she was Prime Minister.

Donovan left an archive of more than a million images, made during 40 years as a professional photographer. In his final interview, a few months before his death, he insisted that his career had been motivated by the sheer enjoyment of photography – the money and fame it had brought was of secondary importance.

What you’ve got to understand about Bailey and me is, we were fantastically hard-working, Bailey and I never wanted to be successful photographers. That wasn’t the plot. We weren’t ambitious, ever. We just wanted to do it.

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