Rossetti painted Elizabeth Siddal, Yeats dedicated his poems to Maud Gonne;
great painters and writers have always been inspired by models and lovers.
And the top photographers have their own famous muses. Irving Penn was
infatuated with the Swedish beauty Lisa Fonssagrives; Mario Sorrenti shot
his girlfriend Kate Moss; David Bailey was obsessed with Jean Shrimpton and
Marie Helvin, and still looks to his wife, Catherine, for inspiration.
The British photographer John Swannell, 61, a contemporary of Bailey, is
equally smitten.
But for him there has only ever been one muse: the American-born model
Marianne Lah.
“The first time I saw Marianne,” he says, “she was on the front cover of a
glossy magazine. I thought she had the most beautiful face I’d ever seen.
Her blonde hair was thrown up in a mess, she had little make-up on, and she
had the most incredible mouth. It was like God had made the perfect woman. I
couldn’t stop looking at her.”
Swannell was already a successful fashion photographer. Having left school at
16, he had started out as a photography assistant at London’s Vogue Studios
and went on to become Bailey’s right-hand man at the end of the 1960s. By
the mid-1970s he had set up his own studio, and his distinctive style was
soon in demand from fashion directors on magazines such as Vogue, Harpers &
Queen, Tatler and The Sunday Times.
As soon as he saw Marianne’s face, he was on the phone to her modelling
agency, hoping to book her for his next fashion shoot. Meeting the
21-year-old did not disappoint. “When she walked onto the set, she was
wearing this swimsuit and I was just mesmerised,” he says. “Everything
about her body – the elegance of her limbs, her long neck, her gazelle-like
movement, her profile – epitomised femininity.
“She was like a young Grace Kelly – perfect in every way. What’s more, there
was something about her that was just so natural, so down-to-earth. She was
untainted by the vanity and preciousness that affected many of the other
models I’d worked with. I guess I’d be lying if I said I didn’t fall in love
with her there and then.”
Marianne had fallen into modelling by accident. Born and raised in Ohio, she’d
been studying chemistry at Cincinnati University when, completely by chance,
she met Andy Warhol. It was the summer of 1977 and Warhol just happened to
be visiting her university to take photographs of the famous American golfer
Jack Nicklaus. “I noticed Warhol straight away because he was instantly
recognisable with his shock of white hair,” Marianne remembers, “but, to my
total surprise, he suddenly came over to me and said, ‘Gee, I like your
boots.’
“I was wearing these knee-high, caramel-coloured embroidered boots which I’d
just bought in Chicago and absolutely adored. He then asked me if I was a
model and told me I looked like some of the girls he worked with in New
York. What was funny, looking back on it now, was that our conversation
continued and he started complaining about the Polaroids he’d taken of
Nicklaus – apparently, he was so tanned, his skin looked the colour of
beetroot.
“I was incredibly flattered by Warhol’s attention. Who wouldn’t be? He wrote
down his contact details and told me to come and see him; he said he’d
introduce me to photographers. To be honest, I didn’t like the idea of New
York – there were loads of muggings going on there at the time. But I
mentioned I was planning to spend Christmas in Europe and he immediately
gave me a list of photographers, magazine editors and fashion designers to
contact out there. I had no intention of following this up, but, funnily
enough, I kept his bit of paper.”
Lah did get to Europe, and while she was in Berlin, she was stopped – again,
by chance – by the German fashion designer Jil Sander, who asked her to
model her forthcoming collection in Paris. Lah had fallen in love with
Europe and the thought of going to Paris was irresistible. As Warhol had
obviously predicted, she was an instant hit on the catwalk and a modelling
career beckoned. At 19, she dropped out of college and moved to Paris,
living above the Dior emporium and a couple of doors from Marlene Dietrich.
Her face started appearing in magazines everywhere, so it was only a matter of
time before she got booked for modelling jobs in London. Recalling her first
encounter with Swannell, she says: “I’d signed up with the agency Models 1,
and I’d already worked with a few British photographers. Then, in May 1979,
I happened to be staying in London for a couple of weeks when my agency
called and said that John had booked me for a fashion shoot. I’d already
heard about the type of work he was known for, and I remember my agent
saying, ‘Oh, you’ll love John. He always makes women look amazing.’ ”
When they eventually met, he was in his early thirties and working in a
Victorian artist’s studio in London’s Belsize Park. He had two children,
Alice and Jane, from his first marriage, to the art teacher Catherine
Taylor, and he was living in Highgate with Alice, the elder of the two
girls. Marianne says she knew immediately there was something different
about Swannell.
“He certainly wasn’t your typical fashion photographer with slicked-back hair,
black leather jacket and loads of bull,” she says. “John looked like a poet,
like a young Byron. He wore black pleated trousers, a black waistcoat and
these wonderful cravats. And yet he wasn’t the slightest bit pretentious. He
was so sweet, so engaging, so stimulating, and I thought the relationship he
had with his little girl was just beautiful. The weird thing is – and I know
it sounds silly – I just knew he was going to be this important person in my
life.”
For Swannell, that first meeting with her changed everything. “I started
booking her all the time,” he admits. “I hardly did a fashion shoot with
anyone else. It got to the point where her agency got really pissed off with
me, saying, ‘You can’t use her all the time. What happens when you get tired
of her and move on to the next model?’ The thing is, I couldn’t look at
anyone else. Nothing was going to change my mind.
“What I could never understand was what she saw in me. I remember the first
time I asked her out for a meal, I’d never been so nervous in my life. It
was like asking Madonna out – I thought there was no way in a million years
she’d say yes.”
But just two months after their first encounter they’d become lovers and Lah
had moved in with Swannell. And the more she got to see him at work, the
more she began to appreciate how passionate he was about photography. “He
really lived and breathed it. On the one hand, I remember being struck by
his pursuit of perfection and meticulous attention to detail, but on the
other, he could be really experimental and completely spontaneous.”
As he recalls, “One of my favourite early photographs of Marianne was taken
one weekend when we were taking a break in the country. As usual, I had my
camera with me and we were simply getting out of the car. At that moment, I
just happened to glance across at her. She was resting one of her arms on
the roof of the car and the other on the door. The sun was reflecting off
the roof and created this intense, ethereal glow on her face, while a sliver
of light skated across the top of her arms. It just took my breath away,” he
says. “So, of course, I grabbed my camera and started shooting.
Compositionally, it was simple, but the results were magical.”
Like much of Swannell’s work, this was shot in monochrome. “I’ve always been
in love with black-and-white. When I first got hold of a camera and began
developing photographs in my parents’ bathroom, I can still remember the
thrill of seeing these images gradually come to life. I’ve been drawn to
black-and-white ever since. It’s just far more evocative than colour. To
me, it truly defines the art form.
“When I first saw the works of postwar American photographers like Richard
Avedon, Horst and Irving Penn, they just blew me away. They were masters of
lighting and the use of black. For me, Penn’s 1950s image of his wife, the
model Lisa Fonssagrives, in the ‘mermaid dress’ is still the most striking
Vogue cover of all time.”
In many ways, Swannell’s style was in stark contrast to much of the fashion
photography of the 1970s – epitomised by the likes of Bailey, with
dynamic shots of models jumping up and down or riding bicycles. Swannell was
drawn to much quieter moments, where mood rather than action was allowed to
unfold.
In a photoshoot he did with Marianne on New York’s Southampton coastline, we
see her sitting on a deserted beach, with her arms curved around her body. A
lone figure in the landscape, she seems lost in thought. Wherever possible,
Swannell interweaves the language of the body with that of the landscape. In
another series, this time in dreamy Welsh woods, near Llandudno, she stands
among thread-like rows of shimmering, naked trees, the print of her dress
reflected in the texture of the forest floor.
In 1982, Swannell and Lah got married. Happily ensconced in London, she never
did get to New York – or see Warhol again. A year after the wedding, she
gave birth to their first child, Sophia, and, five years later Charlie was
born. Although she was still only in her mid-twenties, Marianne gave up
modelling to concentrate on motherhood, only occasionally choosing to appear
in front of the camera lens.
But for Swannell she continued to be the focus of many private works. Among
them, a collection of images he took every summer when they rented a house
on Long Island. In one classic scene, he captures the evocative shape of her
body as she stands on the edge of a diving board, peering down into the
still waters of the pool below; we sense the solitude.
Over the past 30 years, Swannell’s repertoire has grown to include extensive
studies of both the landscape and the nude. At the same time, his portraits
of movie stars, heads of state and royalty regularly appear in publications
and gallery collections around the world. He says: “You can’t be a part-time
artist. You can’t be a part-time poet, painter or photographer. You’ve got
to love it so much that you go to bed thinking about it, and you wake up
thinking about it. I can’t think of doing what I do any other way. And
Marianne, more than anyone, understands that.'
John Swannell in focus
An exhibition of John Swannell’s work will be shown at the Chris Beetles
gallery, 8 & 10 Ryder Street, London SW1, from March 19 until April 5. Tel:
020 7839 7551. For more information visit www.chrisbeetles.com
