John Deakin 1912 -1972

John Deakin (8 May 1912 – 25 May 1972) was an English photographer, best known for his work centred on members of Francis Bacon's Soho inner circle. Bacon based a number of his paintings on photographs he commissioned from Deakin, including portraits of Henrietta Moraes and Lucian Freud. 

Photographs by Deakin are extremely rare.

Deakin also spent many years in Paris and Rome, photographing street scenes. His only stable period of employment as a photographer were two periods of working for Vogue between 1947 and 1954. Deakin initially aspired to be a painter, and as his photographic career waned, Deakin devoted his time to painting in the 1960s, questioning the validity and status of photography as an art form. He showed little interest in curating and publicising his own work, holding only two exhibitions in his lieftime. As a result many of his photographs were lost, destroyed or damaged over time.

A chronic alcoholic, Deakin died in obscurity and poverty, but since the 1980s his reputation has grown through monographs, exhibitions and catalogues.

Although by the mid 1950s Deakin was a successful fashion and portrait photographer for Vogue magazine, it is significant that it was his Parisian street photography that he chose to present in his first exhibition, John Deakin's Paris at the Archer Gallery in 1956, and that he also attempted to secure a publisher for his Paris photographs. Indeed in his lifetime Deakin's two published books were on London and Rome and, similarly, the only two exhibitions of his photographs were focused not on his portraits but on his urban reportage.

In the small catalogue for his Paris show Elizabeth Smart observed that "You certainly won't feel rested after a time in John Deakin's Paris. These pictures take you by the scruff of the neck and insist that you see. If you have never been to Paris, you will find it haunted when you arrive.... By some alchemy this photographer squeezes his heart through his lens, his pity or impudence egging him on!"