Sir Harold and Lady Stockton, of Seagrave Manor, Seagrave, Leics., had one much-loved daughter, Araminta Claudia. Araminta was a beautiful young woman, tall, slim and regal, and the contrast between her long honey-blond hair and her treacle-dark flashing eyes never failed to startle those who met her for the first time. In her second year at Imperial College, London, she met Juan Carlos Corradera, from Argentina. He was a skilled seducer, extremely rich, athletic and breathtakingly handsome, but he had no desire to seduce Araminta. For him it was all or nothing. Within a week of their first meeting, the couple were plunged headlong into love, and within six months they were married. And that is where I come in.
My name is Brian Cazenove, I am in my late twenties, and I have a photographic studio in Leicester. Before the war I worked Saturdays and holidays in my uncle's photographic shop on Humberstone Gate, but I really learned my trade in wartime, as a war photographer attached to the Seventh Armoured Division and the Eighth Army.
I had the privilege of serving for a short time under General O'Connor, the finest general in the British Army in the opinion of his troops. I kept a quasi-official photographic record of the war in North Africa, Italy and Southern France. Many of my photosets appeared in the
Soldier
, and some in
Picture Post
and in the well-known series of HMSO illustrated books. My work is well known, but my name much less so.
I had the great good fortune to be in Naples when it was liberated. Naples in the early spring of 1944 was a city where everything was for sale, and the price of everything was negotiable. The city was thronged with beautiful young women and girls who were delighted to pose nude for photographs for a small fee. Sweeten the deal with a pack of Marlborough cigarettes or two tins of corned beef, they would not only pose, but also offer intimate personal services. With these unlimited opportunities, I quickly learned that beauty alone was not enough, and there had to be some special quality in a girl to make her sexually desirable.
In a three-week r & r, I shot a hundred and forty rolls of film (looted from a German mobile darkroom,) of over 200 girls. I developed a dozen or more rolls of film each day, refining my skills as a processor of films, and poring over the negatives with a strong lens to improve my skills at the delicate arts of portrait and glamour photography. It was a post-graduate education in itself, and I continued to find beautiful models as we travelled north, up through Italy and into France.
Tobruk, Anzio and Monte Cassino honed my skills as an action photographer; Naples gave me my skills at photographing beauty and passion.
I came back to Leicester at the back end of 1945 to find that my uncle had been forced to stop work with an incapacitating stroke, and the shop was closed. I assessed the situation and made it my priority to take a train to London and on out to Ilford to arrange regular supplies of photographic film and paper, and chemicals for developing and printing. I raised the cash for renovations by selling most of my nude and erotic photographs to a man in Chicago who could not have cared less about copyrights or model releases. Then I started to put to good use the Leica llla and the Rolleiflex Automat I had acquired in Italy.
Uncle Bert and Aunt Irene were happy to move into the ground floor flat I found for them off Knighton Lane, and I took over the whole building. The ground-floor front was still a photographic supplies shop. But the back room was made into a large, commodious darkroom and storage area.
Upstairs we had two studios. The smaller; the boxroom, is fitted out with toys and games, large cushions and a wooden playpen. The walls are papered with characters from Walt Disney (my personal aversion, but kids love them), Loony Tunes, Popeye and Betty Boop. The word soon got around that we cater for babies and toddlers, and a sizeable part of the business now is baby photographs. The trick is so simple – over-expose the black and white image, then get a competent colourist to colour-wash the print and highlight with touches of bright colour. Poised somewhere between a photo and a painting, they sell like hot cakes.
The larger room is divided into two with a folding screen. One side of the partition holds a large double bed covered with a coverlet, the other side holds a leather four-seater settee on one wall, and two matching armchairs on the adjoining wall. The large sash windows are covered with milky translucent screens to diffuse the light. One window screen swings back, because sometimes I want to pose a model looking out of the window.
I put a bed in the little attic room, and made myself at home. Compared with some of the billets I had in the army, it was luxury for me.
So much for back-story. Anyway, in the spring of 1949, what happened is that Araminta Stockton, bless her, wanted some really good wedding photos, and what she wanted, she got. And, apparently, she had asked around and got my name as the best photographer for this kind of work, thanks to good mates in the
Leicester Mercury
and its sister paper the illustrated
Leicester Chronicle.
She wanted full coverage at the Church and the reception, naturally enough, but she also wanted colour portraits of herself and each of the four bridesmaids, plus a group. Colour film was just becoming available again. Kodachrome was still not commercially available in Britain, but the USAF bases east of Leicester contained helpful young men who, in exchange for some saucy nude photographs, would get me rolls of film from their equivalent of the Naafi. So that was fixed. I could use up a film or two getting used to the colour palette, and the obliging young USAF blokes would send them home for processing.
Al this could be fixed up well in advance of the late June wedding, and
on the due day, June 5th., everything was ready for the photo session. I had obtained five barstools with thin, tubular chrome legs and a very short back support, and grouped them for the group photograph, and prepared a variety of pastel coloured slides for back projection to tone in with the dresses and makeup. At ten the group arrived, but it was a group of only four. The fourth bridesmaid was stuck on a job in Edinburgh, and would have to come along later.
Of course this made nonsense of the group photograph, which would have to be deferred to the wedding morning. The task for today was to take four colour portraits, of the bride and three of the bridesmaids. And a very pleasant task it turned out to be.
They were four lovely girls, two brunettes, a redhead and the honey-blonde bride. Three were voluptuous, with the Hollywood hourglass figure, large in the bust and hips, slim and nipped-in at the waist. The fourth, the bride herself, was tall and slim, with long, long legs that would make Rita Hayworth or Katharine Hepburn envious. As she was, in a short-sleeved blouse and pinstripe tailored slacks, she looked like a mannequin; in her wedding dress she would make a couturier wet himself.
I have a very particular skill that is a part of my success as a glamour photographer. I am my own make-up artist. Oddly enough I learned the essentials of the job in my teens by hand-colouring photographs. I could make the colours blend to bring out the best features of the subject and conceal their failings. In Italy, I started practising on live subjects, and began to insist on doing the makeup of all my female portrait subjects.
The dresses were similar in design, having deep off-the-shoulder necklines, so I insisted in applying foundation and powder make-up to the neck and shoulders as well as to the face. I pointed out that it would only take a couple of minutes to apply, and not much longer to wash off, so the time would be well spent if unwanted reflections and hot-spots were avoided.
Soon I had four lovely young ladies in their underwear, sitting on barstools, chatting nineteen to the dozen as they waited their turn for the application of powder and paint. Three young ladies in strapless bras, knickers and half-slips, and the fourth, the bride, who declared, a trifle ruefully, that she had never worn a bra in her life, in just her cream silk knickers. I longed to take a clandestine photo with my trusty Leica, but that would have been crass.
The photo-session went very well. Three pairs of willing hands helped each girl in turn into her dress and protected her elaborate hairdo. In turn each one half-sat, half- leaned on the tall stool, I bustled about moving a light a fraction, adjusting a diffuser or a reflector, on one occasion pausing to apply lipstick a shade paler to a rosebud mouth. The individual shots were taken, and I cajoled them into a group for the sheer pleasure of the contrasting tones of fabric, hair and skin.
They all wore dresses of similar shape with low necklines, bare shoulders, little puff sleeves, and almost floor-length tulip shaped skirts that owed something to current fashions, but something more to the bride's own good taste. The two brunette bridesmaids wore rose pink, the redhead in jade green. The bridal gown was, of course, pure white silk, but embroidered with arabesques of silver thread and sprinkled with pearls.
