"The best (portrait photographer) since Nadar and Julia Margaret Cameron." Francis Bacon

John Deakin is today acknowledged as one of the greatest British photographer’s of the twentieth century. However his vintage photographs are incredibly rare.

The photographs offered here were believed lost until their recent rediscovery. Many were included in Deakin’s 1956 exhibition of his Paris photographs and several were previously unknown. Taken together these familiar and unfamiliar images provide an insight into one of the most acclaimed aspects of Deakin’s work, his street photographs, as well as also including unpublished pictures of the Moulin Rouge and of Pablo Picasso.

By the mid 1950s Deakin had established himself as a successful fashion and portrait photographer who, in two stints at Vogue magazine, had gained a reputation for his cruel brilliance and maddening unreliability. However, whereas posthumously his reputation would rest, in particular, on his portraits of Francis Bacon and other Soho luminaries, in his lifetime it was his street photography that received the greatest critical acclaim from the likes of Colin Macinnes and David Sylvester.