Photographs by John Deakin

The photographs of Vogue photographer John Deakin (1912-1972) were particularly important to the artist and over 120 Deakin photographs and a collection of negatives have been found in the Reece Mews studio. Many of these were used as the basis for Bacon's portraits of George Dyer, Peter Lacy, Henrietta Moraes, Isabel Rawthshorne and Lucian Freud. While some of the photographs are in poor condition, their visual impact is still enormous. Many have heavy accretions of paint, and some are torn, crumpled or distorted and held in place with paperclips. Bacon was acutely aware of the way smudged fingerprints and footprints could change an image irrevocably.