What you need to know
Critics are calling David Bailey's new exhibition, Bailey's Stardust, "dazzling" and "compelling". The survey show, opening today at the National Portrait Gallery, London, includes photographs from Bailey's 50-year career as a fashion and celebrity photographer, as well as lesser-known travel images and new work.
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What the critics like
David Bailey's "dazzling retrospective", from stunning celebrity portraits to travel photography, creates "one great portrait of 50 years", says Sue Steward in the Evening Standard. Aside from the pleasures and beauties on show there are some surprises, including scenes from trips to remote or unseen places and zinging shots from a camera phone.
Bailey's enormous new retrospective reminds us that for more than five decades "Bailey has been chronicling and creating that most elusive, impalpable, yet desirable human attribute: glamour", says Alastair Sooke in the Daily Telegraph. It is impossible not to be impressed by the sheer brightness of the star-wattage lighting up the walls.
"It is an astonishing collection by anybody's measure that is at once, humorous, brutal, perceptive and refreshing," says Chris Sullivan in The Independent. Bailey has not only photographed the truly iconic but is an icon himself.
What they don't like
Bailey doesn't get it right every time and "his portrait of Beyonce, for instance, looks like a bland publicity photograph", says Sooke in Telegraph. But while looking at pictures of famous people can be inane activity, Bailey's exhibition is compelling because he does not flatter, and has never lost his take-it-or-leave-it shrug.
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