More than a retrospective, the presentation shows how one photographer redrew the boundaries of celebrity culture.
The Marta Ortega Pérez Foundation will turn its gallery in A Coruña into a time capsule of swinging London on 28 June, when “David Bailey’s Changing Fashion” opens with more than 140 photographs drawn from six decades of work. The show is the foundation’s fifth project devoted to fashion image-making and its first devoted to the British photographer whose intimate portraits helped reset the tone of editorial photography.
Visitors will move from early black-and-white studies of Jean Shrimpton to later colour shots of Mick Jagger, Cecil Beaton and Rudolf Nureyev, then come face-to-face with Bailey’s notorious “Box of Pin-Ups,” where the Kray twins stare down the lens with the same certainty as film stars. Studio ephemera lines the route, while a newly commissioned film and a printed publication inspired by Ritz—the fashion-and-gossip magazine Bailey co-founded in 1976—lend extra context to a career that blurred the line between document and performance.
“From the early days, Bailey consistently backed his own vision, breaking the rules of fashion photography and inventing new ones at will,” said Ortega Pérez, who also chairs Inditex. Her foundation has already shown work by Peter Lindbergh, Steven Meisel, Helmut Newton and, most recently, Irving Penn; Penn’s exhibition closes on 1 May, clearing the space for Bailey.
While the photographer is often framed as a chronicler of 1960s youth culture, the selection in A Coruña follows his progress well into the 1970s, mapping how a stripped-back aesthetic migrated from the Vogue studio to celebrity portraiture and beyond. By gathering these images in one place—some on public view for the first time—the foundation underlines Bailey’s part in shifting the centre of fashion photography from ornate sets to the chemistry between sitter and camera.
A Coruña may lie far from the King’s Road, yet the exhibition arrives with the same pulse that once ran through those streets. When the lights go up, viewers will leave not with nostalgia for a bygone London, but with a renewed sense of how fashion imagery can still push culture forward—one unguarded frame at a time.
