David Bailey. Eighties. Art Edition No. 101–200, 'Jerry Hall and Jacques Henri Lartigue', 1983

Somewhere in the parade of glossy 1980s faces that fills this edition sits an old man in a plain jacket, next to Jerry Hall, and he matters more than the whole decade arranged around him. The old man is Jacques Henri Lartigue, who was photographing the speed and leisure of Belle Époque France as a boy, with a child's delight, before David Bailey was born. The signed print bundled with Art Edition No. 101–200 is that unlikely meeting, dated 1983, and it is the entire reason this version of the volume exists.

Lartigue is the hinge that makes the image sing. He photographed almost nothing but his own charmed life, race cars and beach outings and women caught mid-stride, and only in old age was he discovered by the art world as an accidental master of the snapshot. To set him beside a supermodel in 1983 is to stage a hundred years of the medium in a single exposure.

Bailey made his name two decades earlier, in the London of the 1960s, shooting Jean Shrimpton, the Kray twins, and a Vogue that suddenly looked modern because of him. Eighties gathers his work from a later, less mythologized stretch, when the razor style had settled into a mature house manner. The decade brought him a fresh cast, the era's models and musicians and design-world faces, shot with the flat, confrontational light that dares a sitter to flinch.

The pictures around the print hold up on their own terms. Bailey shot the decade's stars with a graphic bluntness, black grounds, hard frontal light, no flattery offered and none apparently wanted. It is a colder register than the loose, giddy energy of his sixties work, and some sitters wear it more easily than others.

The Lartigue print is the interesting object here, more than the decade it comes wrapped in. It stages a meeting across three generations of the medium: the amateur genius who caught the twentieth century arriving, the model who embodied a certain 1980s glamour, and the photographer pressing the shutter on both. Bailey's regard for the older man reads plainly in the frame, one image-maker paying quiet tribute to another by putting him in front of the lens and letting him simply be.

For a studio owner weighing the purchase, honesty matters. The underlying Eighties is good work rather than essential Bailey; the 1960s pictures collected in the larger monograph titled David Bailey remain the more formative body, the ones that actually shifted how portraits looked. What the art edition adds is not deeper access to the photographs but a signed sheet and a fine anecdote, which is collector logic, not study logic.

There is also the plain fact of scarcity to reckon with. Only a hundred copies carry this particular print, numbered 101 through 200, each signed, precisely the kind of detail that moves a photograph from the library to the vault. Whether that belongs in a working studio depends on what the shelf is for.

None of that makes it a weak object, only a specific one. The standard Eighties delivers every photograph inside these covers for a fraction of the outlay, so the premium buys the print and the print alone. Anyone tempted should be clear about which of the two they actually want; the pictures are available cheaply, and the signed rarity is the entire difference in price.

What you are paying the premium for is one photograph, not a decade; the man who caught a young century's ease, sitting still for the man who shot an old century's fame.