David Bailey. Eighties

Somewhere in the middle of the decade that handed photography shoulder pads, hairspray, and its first serious romance with the color print, David Bailey kept doing the plain thing he had always done: set a person against nothing and wait for them to become themselves. Eighties collects that stubbornness across ten years engineered to reward its opposite.

The claim the collection makes, mostly by what it leaves out, is that the eighties were not Bailey's decade and it does not matter. The sixties made him: Jean Shrimpton, the Box of Pin-Ups, the notion that a working-class kid from the East End with a camera could out-cool everyone in the room. By the eighties that kid was an institution, and institutions are supposed to go soft. These pictures decline to.

The evidence is in the backgrounds, or the absence of them. While the decade around him drowned portraits in gels, dry ice, and elaborate set design, Bailey mostly cleared the frame and lit the face. The famous and the unknown get the same flat, frontal scrutiny. A pop star is offered no more flattery than a fashion assistant. The gloss of the era turns up in the clothing and the hair, because it had to, yet it almost never reaches the eyes, and the eyes are where the work was always happening.

Look at how he handles color, which the sixties never really asked of him. The palette stays deliberately unglamorous, closer to a passport photo than a fashion plate, as if he distrusted the seduction that color can smuggle in. Skin is skin. A red is only a red, not a mood. He shoots straight into the lens more often than not, daring the sitter to hold the gaze, and most of them do, because the alternative is to look like they blinked first.

The decade's faces pass through in volume, pop stars and actors and painters and models, and the camera greets a chart-topper and an unknown with the same unimpressed patience. TASCHEN prints the work big, which does the confrontation a favor; at this size a held gaze becomes something you have to withstand rather than glance past. The scale also exposes the weaker sittings, the ones where somebody gave nothing and got a competent picture in return.

A skeptic could fairly call this coasting. By the eighties the method was three decades old, and there is a reading of the whole collection as a master repeating himself while the market paid handsomely for the name. Some of these frames do carry the ease of a man who could turn out a strong portrait in his sleep and, now and then, plainly did. Not every sitter here justifies the attention the printing lavishes on them, and a decade is a long time to hold one idea without it slackening somewhere.

What outlasts the doubt is the consistency itself. Stripped of the decade's costume, the pictures make explicit an argument the sixties work only implied: that style is weather and structure is climate, and a real portraitist bets everything on the second. Bailey's eighties are minor Bailey. Minor Bailey is still a sharper reading of a face than most photographers reach at full stretch.

Read this one for the discipline, then track down the career survey TASCHEN published under his name alone, where the sixties detonate all over again and the through-line becomes impossible to miss. Start with the eighties for the argument. Start with the sixties for the thrill.