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| Rupert Smith | |||||
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BIOGRAPHY
Find out more about my biography work by clicking on the covers below.
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Physique: the Life of John S Barrington (Serpent’s Tail 1997)
My second book arose out of another long friendship, this time with the photographer
and writer John S Barrington. I remembered his male nude photography from
magazines I’d “read” in my teens, and decided to track him down for
a profile in Square Peg magazine in 1986. That’s when I discovered that there was
much more to him than sexy pictures; he’d led an outrageous bohemian existence,
knew and photographed Jean Cocteau and John Lennon and, to top it all, was married with
children and grandchildren.
Over the next five years, John and I collaborated and what was to have been his a
utobiography – but he could never decide how he wanted to write it, and kept changing
his mind as fast as I could write. Just before he died in 1991, he asked me to “do
something with this bloody book”. I rewrote it as a straightforward biography.
This was one lily that needed no gilding.
Since the publication of Physique, I’ve received many letters from men who were
witnesses to that extraordinary period of history before the legalisation of homosexuality,
when photographers like Barrington and the magazines that they published were a lifeline to
isolated gay people. I’ve continued researching the subject, and will be turning it
into another book in the next couple of years.
Order Physique from
Serpent’s Tail.
To see Barrington’s work, go to Tim Wilbur’s Vintage Physique Photography
website.
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