Look Again: The Autobiography

By David Bailey with James Fox

My collaboration with David Bailey to write his memoir Look Again; tracing and narrating his extraordinary life from the bombed out East End of London in wartime; the working class boy who came to dictate, through his photographs, much of  the style of London in the 1960’s and onwards.

Bailey burst onto the scene in 1960 with his revolutionary photographs for Vogue. Discarding the rigid rules of a previous generation of portrait and fashion photographers, he channelled the energy of London’s newly informal street culture into his work. Funny, brutally honest and ferociously talented, he became as famous as his subjects.

“Look Again (Macmillan, £20), the photographer David Bailey’s memoir, is a loud advert for the genius of ghostwriter James Fox, who traps Bailey in the amber of his own words, and exhibits him as a narcissistic monster – but never a dull one: “I like single words. Like ‘moonglow’. It’s such a nice word. It’s like a poem in itself. You don’t have to say anything else. Tells you everything. Or ‘c—’. Perfect word.” – Iona McLaren, The Telegraph

As seen in The Telegraph top 50 books of 2020.