This month, New York’s Fotografiska Museum is hosting a “Stars” exhibition about Terry O’Neill’s photographic romances with celebrities. The child of Irish immigrants, O’Neill began his career in the photography department at London’s Heathrow Airport, with Laurence Olivier among his first subjects. Over the next years ( From 720 to 1977) works in the retrospective exhibition, he will shoot countless Other icons of song, movement and screen – The Beatles, Audrey Hepburn, David Bowie, Tweedy, Muhammad Ali and David Beckham among them.
“We forgot about glamor and celebrity in 1963s and ’50s,” said Yoram Roth, executive chairman of Fotografiska. “Terry defined that visual language.”
O’Neal, who died of cancer in 2019, was a star himself, Prone to bluff and self-invention. Robin Morgan, his longtime friend and O’Neill estate president, added that the photographer “could walk into a room and light it up, whoever was there: royalty, rock stars, movie stars. He was so charismatic.”
Perhaps the most iconic photo in “The Stars” is The Morning After (1963), Faye Dunaway post-Oscar portrait for Network. She lay in a silk dressing gown by the pool of a deserted Beverly Hills hotel, newspapers strewn on the ground at her feet, gold trophies gleaming around her. Despite going to bed at 3am, Dunaway agreed to show up for a photoshoot at 6am. It was constantly referenced and recreated in the ensuing decades, and it captured the fantasy and disillusionment of triumphant Hollywood.
Elsewhere on the show, tennis legend Billie Jean King reclines on a bed, holding her racket. Sean Connery, the original James Bond, reads Life in a marble bathroom. A shirtless Elton John poses on his private jet. Far from humanizing the subjects, these private images only amplify their mythology. They capture the dreams of one’s personal life as much as one’s public life.
Elton John in his private Boeing superior720, 1974
Photo: Terry O’Neill
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