Barry Lategan, photographer who launched Twiggy as the face of the Swinging Sixties – obituary

He suggested a haircut and the ‘gawky schoolgirl’ returned with ‘a little golden cap… a cross between an angel and Greta Garbo’

Barry Lategan, who has died aged 89, was an award-winning portrait and fashion photographer credited with “discovering” Twiggy and taking the striking photographs that launched her career as a supermodel.
In January 1966 he was phoned by his friend Leonard Lewis, the Mayfair hairdresser, who asked him to see a girl who wanted to be a model. Her name was Lesley Hornby, a 16-year-old from Neasden who had a Saturday job in the salon as a shampoo girl.
“She came to my studio with her boyfriend, Justin de Villeneuve,” Lategan told the Daily Mail in 2000, “and while he talked to me, she wandered around the studio touching the equipment. She was a skinny young thing with long hair which was all fizzy and split-ended, but she had such a lovely face.
“I called Leonard and said: ‘I like her but her hair’s a mess.’ She agreed to have her hair cut because they were broke at the time and she needed the photos. She went back to Leonard’s and he took seven hours to create her look. It was amazing: he’d sculpted a little golden cap. At that moment, she turned from a gawky schoolgirl into a cross between an angel and Greta Garbo.”
When she returned to Lategan’s studio she had painted false eyelashes on her face and, as Lategan recalled, she had “a presence about her”.
“I took loads of photographs that day, mostly of her looking straight at the camera or with a little quiff on the side of her face and imitating the film stars of the Thirties,” Lategan said. “She was always able to play for the camera and was very good at mimicry.”
A few days after the shoot he was called by Deirdre McSharry, a journalist with the Daily Express, who had seen some of his photographs at Leonard’s: “At the end of that week, my photographs appeared under the headline ‘The Face of ’66’.”
Lategan even claimed a role in selecting the name that identified her for the rest of a career. “Her boyfriend said ‘Stop biting your nails, Twigs’ – short for Twiggy. I said, ‘If you ever go professional you should call her that name,’ so I suppose I’m partly responsible.”
In 2006 Lategan donated his best known photo of Twiggy to a charity auction at Bonhams for Help the Hospices. The picture sold for nearly £6,000.
Barry Lategan was born on January 7 1935 in South Africa and came to Britain in 1955 to study at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. His studies were interrupted by National Service, and while serving with RAF air traffic control in Cologne he joined a local camera hobbyist club.
He returned to South Africa and trained in Cape Town. Back in London in 1961 he took a job as an £8-per-week photographer with a creative agency before founding his own studio in Chelsea.
It was his collaboration with Leonard of Mayfair that provided the first opportunity to develop his talent. As well as Twiggy he met the model Grace Coddington, later creative director-at-large of American Vogue. She became a great supporter of his work, securing him his first of many Vogue covers (of a fur-clad Leslie Jones) in 1968. He also worked extensively alongside Lucia Raffaelli at Vogue Italia.
Lategan was ahead of his time in championing unconventional-looking models such as Marie Helvin and Cathee Dahmen, and he became known for his almost painterly skills in lighting up a face and for his attention to composition. He was once described as “the Gainsborough of fashion photography” to David Bailey’s Hogarth.
Nudes were part of his creative output, his use of light and form showing the influence of sculpture on his work. In an interview he described being greatly moved by Henry Moore’s Mother and Child at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1988. The same year he won an award for his work on the Pirelli Calendar.
Meanwhile his portrait subjects included the Princess Royal, Paul and Linda McCartney, Germaine Greer, Calvin Klein, Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Salman Rushdie. He also directed television adverts for the Armani perfume brand, for which he won a Clio Award.
Lategan’s photographs were exhibited and examples are held in the permanent collections of, among others, the V&A, the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Photographic Society, Bath.
In the mid-1970s Lategan moved to New York, eventually setting up a studio in Manhattan. He returned to live in London in 1989 and joined the Director’s Studio agency. He was made an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 2007.
Lategan’s career had a sad coda when in 2015 he appeared in court charged with groping two women he allegedly scouted for photo shoots. His barrister successfully deployed psychiatric evidence to show that Lategan was unfit to stand trial and that the offending acts had occurred as a consequence of brain damage he had sustained from an horrific fall.
On a Rare Dementia Support website his daughter-in-law Zoe recalled how, after Lategan fell down a flight of concrete steps in 2006, his family had noticed a marked change in his personality and behaviour, which continued to decline over succeeding years. He became increasingly disinhibited and was eventually diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, a rare form of dementia which results in sociopathic behaviour, though not before he had spent eight months in custody after his arrest.
After his release he was sectioned under the mental health act and placed in a secure hospital.
After a brief first marriage to Lynn Kohlman, in 1979 Barry Lategan married Charlene Corrigan-Hollis. The marriage was later dissolved and he is survived by their son.
Barry Lategan, born January 7 1935, died August 13 2024