INTERVIEW:Photographer Tony Higgins is a master of his craft. His eye for detail, his refined taste and his talent for getting the best out of his subjects are still in sharp focus on the eve of his 70th birthday
NO HISTORY OF modern fashion can be understood properly without reference to photography, the visual archive left behind when time moves on and tastes change. The best photographs, with their idealised images of fashionable women, chronicle the mood and spirit of the age, tell us what we wore, how we wanted to look, how we lived.
In Ireland, fashion photography first came into focus in the 1960s with a young carpenter-turned-photographer called Tony Higgins who pioneered a new era with stylish images and a technical virtuosity that put Irish fashion on the map and set standards for the generations who followed in his wake.
The most revered of all Irish commercial photographers, he will be 70 tomorrow and is as active as ever. Designers, art directors, models and TV producers who have worked with him consider him a master with few equals when it comes to lighting. Former models such as Sharon Bacon and Alison Doody, who later became well-known, were discovered by him in a career that has spanned more than four decades and shows no sign of waning.
With his gentle, almost abstract air, slim figure and slight stoop developed from years crouched behind cameras, he looks younger than his years and cuts a dash dressed in a casual striped shirt and jeans. We meet in his spacious studio off Dublin’s South Circular Road where books on photography and art line the bookshelves, and framed fashion photographs line the wall, but nothing of his work is on display. Pinned up casually on a noticeboard are his portraits of Bertie Ahern, Mary McAleese, Roy Keane, Christy Moore and others.
Famously modest, he is dismissive of any praise and though he has shelf-loads of awards, none is framed and there is no slick CV to hand. Any comparisons with outstanding photographers such as David Bailey and Richard Avedon are politely brushed aside. “What I do is not art, it’s a craft,” he argues. “I am not saying that photography isn’t an art, but a lot of the time with commercial photography you are taking an art director’s ideas and embellishing them. Yeah, I am good at lighting, but there are a lot of others who are good.”
Photographer-turned-movie-director Conor Horgan, one of his many proteges, thinks differently. “He defined the decades. His quality is head and shoulders above everybody else. He is shy; most photographers are shy. Having a camera allows us to really look at people, and he is a master of more than one craft. He has a great eye and great taste. What he is best at is getting the best out of people.”
Born in Dublin in l939, Tony Higgins was brought up in Hazelhatch, Co Kildare, by his grandmother Josephine McAsey, who had a 30-acre cattle farm. “Myself and the granny got on grand. She didn’t speak much and I didn’t speak much,” he recalls. “And I went to the local national school in Celbridge whenever I felt like it.”
He got interested in carpentry because his grandfather was a foreman carpenter from Scotland whose tools were in the house “and I used to play with them and developed a grá for them”.
His first job was working with a builder on a housing estate in Finglas and later Coolock. Laying floors for a year “and every house was the same”, then hanging doors or fitting skirting boards became “painfully boring”. After a couple of months working on Liberty Hall, he decided to study mechanical drawing in Bolton Street. At the same time, photography became a bit of a hobby.
One day, passing the Phoenix Hall on O’Connell Street, he saw a photographic exhibition “and it was the first time it occurred to me you could earn a living from photography”. Later, looking for advice on this, he landed a job in St Stephen’s Green with a flamboyant photographer from Cork called Conn Conner and his wife Daphne Verschoyle Campbell, “and it was the best thing I ever did. I learned so much from him.” Studio J, as it was called, did a thriving business in passports, weddings, degrees and conferrings as well as passing trade.
“He was a tall man with a beard and bow tie, and incredibly grand, who drove a Harley Davidson with a sidecar in which I used to sit with the camera gear,” Higgins recalls. “We would go around the city centre churches to see if there was a wedding on, and 50 per cent of the time, they would not have booked a photographer. We’d lash back to Stephen’s Green, develop the film, then race to the reception, commandeer a table, lay out a dozen 10x8s and sit and take orders.”
Within a year he was running the business, but after deciding to take the plunge and go out on his own, he rented a floor of a house in Lower Rathmines Road, close to Kodak. “Charles Ward Mills had started a model agency and Miriam Woodbyrne and Betty Whelan and the whole fashion thing was beginning to stir, with models such as Adrienne Ring who became famous, and designers such as Sybil Connolly, Irene Gilbert and later Ib Jorgensen, who became a great client of mine and never wanted anyone else.”
These were the days of David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton capturing the heady new youthful mood in London as street fashion replaced haute couture. He remembers photographing a model with an open copy of Vogue on the floor trying to recreate Bailey’s lighting while she imitated Shrimpton’s pose.
“I used to look at magazine cover shots and look at the catch light in the eye [of the model] and that way I could see how the lighting was – whether it was a bounce brolly light or a big square light. There was no photographic school and the lighting we used was very basic, just a front and hair light for a portrait.”
And then the girls. “There were rugby club dances and you got to know people and girls were starting to join model agencies and you became aware of the 1960s thing in London. I got into doing portfolios for models such as Ann Davis, Adrienne Ring, Hilary Freyne, Grace O’Shaughnessy, Suzanne McDougal and Catherine Keelahan. “So that’s how it started for me,” he says with a smile.
It was a very different world to today. “The major difference was that there were no hairdressers, no make-up [artists], no stylists – what was a stylist? – on a shoot, which was mostly just a client sending 15 garments. Models did their own hair and make-up, and brought their own accessories – a bag of shoes and hats and big-time hairpieces.”
Former model Sharon Bacon recalls that he did her first test shots. “I could not believe it when I looked at those photos – he makes you look a million dollars and is a genius when it comes to lighting. He is very precise, very exact, he really is a master of his craft. I always enjoyed working with him and trusted him. He was the man. He was the one you wanted to impress.”
If genius is the infinite capacity for taking pains, studious attention to detail remains Higgins’ hallmark. “I do my homework. I can’t understand photographers who go out on a day’s shoot to locations they have never seen before, perhaps selected by stylists. I always do a recce. I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything with a stylist, hairdresser or make-up artist I didn’t know. I wouldn’t take that chance.”
As for models, those with classic looks are his preferred choices. “I don’t do ugly – it’s just not for me. If I am doing a portrait, I always want to make them look as good as I can. I can’t stand this whole pole-dancer look; too much fake tan, too much make-up and too much blonde. I admire the portraiture of photographer Annie Leibovitz and her ability to get herself in that niche of photographing only photogenic people, but [Richard] Avedon was my hero. He worked almost exclusively in black and white and the quality was superb. His photograph of the model with the elephants is the quintessential fashion picture.”
Now mostly working in the commercial field, where he credits Eamon O’Flaherty, creative director of Arks Advertising with giving him his first – and a lot of other – work, he spent quite a few years lighting TV ads, but has cut down on that work. “I thought you could do it and still be a stills photographer, but it is amazing how quickly people think you do only one. As a lighting cameraman, you never know what time you will finish at – you have to be somewhere at 8am and you might not get home until midnight. Now I just do a few mini commercials.” Horgan recalls that Higgins was so much in demand “commercials were scheduled around his availability”.
Higgins' latest venture is a book called I Love My Zimmer, a collaboration between him and set designer/model maker Bill Fallover. It's a fresh and funny take on an item traditionally associated with old age and infirmity, with photographs of a collection of zany Zimmer frames called the fetish Zimmer, the eco Zimmer, the beach Zimmer, edible Zimmer and even a Stone Age Zimmer.
In the spring, he will appear at work photographing a model in Paris draped in a red gown and holding a horse for a new four-part TV series called A Model Agent, judged by model Erin O'Connor.
His wife, Kathy O’Gara (“It was like winning the Lotto, marrying her!”), gave birth to their first child Luke three years ago in December, which has added another rich and unexpected dimension to his life, although he joked with friends that he got the bus pass and a new baby at the same time. “He’s a very gentle little fellow, more Kathy than me, and light-hearted. If he’s having something to eat, he’ll offer it to you. I’d like to stick around long enough so that he will remember me.”
In the meantime, “here I am, working away, 40-odd years later, and in spite of recession I still have jobs coming in, mostly advertising and corporate, as well as fashion. We do a lot of set building, so my days as a carpenter were not wasted. As for my 70th birthday, it will be pretty low key I imagine. Birthdays don’t mean a lot to me. Other people’s birthdays mean more.”
His friend, fashion designer Michael Mortell, doubts whether it will pass unnoticed and pays fulsome tribute to “someone with a great eye and a great sense of proportion and composition, whose dedication and professionalism are without equal. He is generous to a fault, is unfailing in loyalty and friendship. And the best party thrower I have ever known. He is, quite simply, the chief.”