David Bailey. Eighties. Art Edition No. 1–100, ‘Yves Saint Laurent’, 1981

Somewhere after the sixties turned him into a symbol and before the knighthood turned him into an institution, David Bailey spent a decade nobody talks about. Eighties is the record of it, and the standard line is that this was Bailey coasting, a famous man photographing famous people because he could. The pictures suggest something more interesting: a photographer who had finally stopped trying to prove anything, and got quieter and sharper for it.

There is an irony sitting under the decade. To the British public the eighties were when Bailey became a voice on television, the face of the Olympus campaign that turned a serious photographer into a catchphrase. The pictures he was actually making at the same time run in the opposite direction, away from charm, toward a bare confrontation with the sitter. The more famous the persona got, the plainer and less ingratiating the real work became. The catchphrase and the cruelty of the real portraits belong to the same man, and the gap between them is the story of the decade.

Look at how little happens in the strongest frames. A face on plain seamless, the light hard and frontal, no prop, no set, no wink at the viewer. He had built the sixties on charm and motion, on the idea that a portrait could be a flirtation. By the eighties he was stripping all of that out. The 1981 portrait of Yves Saint Laurent that anchors this Art Edition is a study in exhaustion and control, a designer at the height of his powers looking as though he would rather be anywhere else, and Bailey lets the contradiction stand instead of flattering it away.

What the flat setup exposes is temperament. With nothing to look at but the face, small things carry enormous weight: the set of a jaw, a gaze that will not quite meet the lens, the particular fatigue of the very famous. The Saint Laurent portrait works precisely because it denies the designer his glamour and hands him his exhaustion instead. A lesser photographer would have lit the myth. This one photographs the person keeping the myth running.

The range across the decade is wider than the coasting story allows. Rock stars, minor royals, unknowns, the odd fashion assignment, all shot with the same refusal to decorate. He photographs a celebrity and a stranger with identical attention, which quietly drains the celebrity of the very thing that made them a subject. What is left is a face and whatever the face is failing to hide.

The confrontation is the point, and it comes from somewhere. Bailey came up in the East End with no interest in flattering anyone, and by the eighties the charm that once softened that edge had burned off. He shoots close, holds the frame, and lets the silence do the work until the sitter stops arranging their face and simply presents it. The good portraits here have the quality of a stare returned, two people deciding who blinks first, and the camera catching the exact second before either does.

The skeptics are not entirely wrong. Some of these portraits are merely competent, a great photographer on cruise control, and the flat studio setup that concentrates the finest ones flattens the weaker ones into repetition. A book this size exposes the difference. There are spreads where the absence of the old spark reads less as maturity and more as a man who has done this ten thousand times.

Even so, the strongest of the eighties work settles the argument in its favor. Stripped of the decade that made him and the reputation that trailed after, what remains is a photographer who trusted a plain background and a hard light over any effect, and mostly got the truth of a person out of them. The signed print raises one image to a collector's object; the run of a hundred copies will find the people who want the Saint Laurent on a wall. The decade that looked like a coast turns out to be where he learned to disappear behind the picture.

The real move is to set this beside the sixties books and read the two together. Box of Pin-Ups sold you the myth; this hands you the man who outlived it. Pull both down. Then decide who was really coasting.