No photographer since the 1960s has had a greater impact on our perception of photography and the photographer than David Bailey. As famous as the famous faces on which he trained his camera, he opened up a world in which he was himself a central figure.

If Bailey and his work had been predominantly associated with London in the sixties, his subject matter in the seventies was truly international. The tone was set by his first major assignment for Vogue in January 1970, a fashion shoot in the context of dramatic environmental backdrops in Turkey. Throughout the decade—the last to witness lavish spending by magazines—Bailey appeared to use fashion sittings as a means to fulfill his childhood ambition to be the great explorer, while at the same time becoming a consummate master of studio fashion in the age of the "glamour revival."

Bailey's photography in the 1970s is most significant for the expansion of its range. Coinciding with the rapid growth of photographic galleries, he was determined to photograph cultures that fascinated him. His incisive documents of India, Mexico, Japan, Brazil, and New Guinea, many of them previously unknown, culminated at the end of the decade in the most political of his reportages, that of the Vietnamese boat people. At the same time, acclaimed TV documentaries on Andy Warhol, Cecil Beaton, and Luchino Visconti provided opportunities for extended series of stills, as compelling today as they were at the time. 250 illustrations in color and duotone.