Angus McBean (photographer)
Angus McBean (8 June 1904 – 9 June 1990)
He was a Welsh photographer, set designer and cult figure associated with surrealism.
Known for musician photographs and Motion picture stars.
Angus McBean was born in Newbridge, Monmouthshire, Wales on 8 June 1904. Despite the surname and the family’s claim to be head of the sub-clan MacBean, they had been Welsh for generations. His father, Clement Philip James McBean, was a surveyor in the mines and the family moved frequently around Wales with his job. McBean attended Monmouth School and Newport Technical College, at which time he developed an interest in photography. Fascinated by the apparently magical properties of this process, Angus wanted to be able to take pictures of people and sold a gold watch left to him by his grandfather to raise the five pounds necessary for the equipment.
At the age of fifteen McBean took part in the amateur dramatics productions at the Lyceum Theatre in Monmouth, where he was mostly involved in the creation of sets, props and costumes. Later in life he credited this experience as being the start of his lifelong interest in dressing up and performing.
In 1925, after his father’s early death, McBean moved with his mother and younger sister Rowena to a three bedroomed cottage at 21 Lowfield Road, West Acton. For the next seven years he worked for Liberty’s department store in the antiques department learning restoration, while his personal life was spent in photography, mask-making and watching plays in the West End theatre. In 1932 he left Liberty’s and grew his distinctive beard to symbolise the fact that he would never be a wage-slave again. Meeting the stage designers Motley Theatre Design Group he helps in creating theatrical props, including a commission of medieval scenery and some shoes for John Gielgud’s 1933 production of Richard of Bordeaux.
Pre-War photography
The artist McBean, as he was still known as a mask maker, gained a commission in 1936 from Ivor Novello for masks for his play “The Happy Hypocrite.” Novello was so impressed with McBean’s romantic photographs that he commissioned him to take a set of production photographs as well, including young actress Vivien Leigh. The results, taken on stage with McBean’s idiosyncratic lighting, instantly replaced the set already made by the long-established but stolid Stage Photo Company. McBean had a new career and a photographic leading lady: he was to photograph Vivien Leigh on stage and in the studio for almost every performance she gave until her death thirty years later.
McBean resultantly became one of the most significant portrait photographers of the 20th century, and was known as a photographer of celebrities. In the spring of 1942 his career was temporarily ruined when he was arrested in Bath for criminal acts of homosexuality. He was sentenced to four years in prison and was released in the autumn of 1944. After the Second World War, McBean was able to successfully resume his career
Post World War II.
Despite the decline in demand for theatre and production art during the 1950s, McBean’s creative and striking ideas provided him with work in the emergent record cover business with companies such as EMI, when he was commissioned to create Cliff Richard’s first four album sleeves. McBean’s later works included being the photographer for the cover of The Beatles’ first album Please Please Me, as well as commissions by a number of other performers.[9] In 1969 he returned with the Beatles to the same location to shoot the cover for their album Get Back. This later came out as Let It Be with a different cover, but McBean’s photo was used (together with an outtake from the Please Please Me cover shoot) for the cover of the Beatles’ 1962–1966 and 1967–1970 compilations in 1973.[citation needed] In his later years he became more selective of the work he undertook, and continued to explore surrealism whilst taking portrait photographs of individuals such as Agatha Christie, Audrey Hepburn, Laurence Olivier and Noël Coward. Both periods of his work (pre and post war) are now eagerly sought by collectors and his work sits in many major collections around the world.
In 1990 McBean fell ill whilst on holiday in Morocco, and after returning to England he died at Ipswich Heath Road Hospital on his eighty-sixth birthday.
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