David Hamilton (15 April 1933 – 25 November 2016) was a British photographer and film director best known for his photography of young women and girls, mostly in the nude. His signature soft focus style was called the "Hamilton Blur", which was erroneously thought to be achieved by smearing Vaseline on the lens of his camera. Hamilton's images became part of an "art or pornography" debate.
In October 2016, French presenter Flavie Flament accused him of raping her in 1987, when she was 13 years old. In November 2016, French magazine L'Obs published anonymous accounts from three other former models affirmed to have been raped by Hamilton. Hamilton issued a statement threatening legal action against his accusers and claimed that he did not do anything wrong. On 25 November 2016, he was found dead in his Paris apartment by apparent suicide.
Early life
Hamilton was born in 1933 and grew up in London. His schooling was interrupted by World War II. As an evacuee, he spent some time in the countryside of Dorset, which inspired some of his work. After the war, Hamilton returned to London and finished his schooling.
Career and later life
His artistic skills began to emerge during a job at an architect's office. At age 20, he went to Paris, where he worked as a graphic designer for Peter Knapp of Elle magazine. After becoming known and successful, he was hired away from Elle by Queen magazine in London as an art director. Hamilton soon realised his love for Paris, however, and after returning there, he became the art director of Printemps, the city's largest department store. While Hamilton was still employed at Printemps, he began doing commercial photography, and the dreamy, grainy style of his images quickly brought him success.
His photographs were in demand by other magazines such as Réalités, Twen and Photo. By the end of the 1960s, all of Hamilton's photographs appeared to have been snapped as if through a hazy mist. His further successes included dozens of photographic books with combined sales well into the millions; five feature films; countless magazine displays and museum and gallery exhibitions. His work was exhibited in every one of the first three years of The Photographers' Gallery, London, but were roundly condemned by Euan Duff for its "cliched pictorial symbolism, exploiting soft focus, pastel colours, country landscapes and old houses, old fashioned clothes and even white doves to give a phoney impression of heaIth-food ad naturalness; they are a sort of wholemeal stoneground pornography," exhibited "because the gallery needs the money."
In December 1977, Images Gallery—a studio owned by Bob Persky at 11 East 57th Street in Manhattan—showed his photographs at the same time that Bilitis was released. At that time, art critic Gene Thornton wrote in The New York Times that they reveal "the kind of ideal that regularly was expressed in the great paintings of the past". Hamilton has said that his work looks for "the candor of a lost paradise". In his book, Contemporary Photographers, curator Christian Caujolle wrote that Hamilton worked only with two fixed devices: "a clear pictorial intention and a latent eroticism, ostensibly romantic, but asking for trouble".
In 1995, Hamilton said that people "have made contradiction of nudity and purity, sensuality and innocence, grace and spontaneity. I try to harmonize them, and that's my secret and the reason for my success". Besides depicting young women and girls, Hamilton composed photographs of flowers, men, landscapes, farm animals, pigeons, and still lifes of fresh fruit. Several of his photographs look like oil paintings. Most of his work gives an impression of timelessness because of the absence of cars, modern buildings and advertisement boards. In 1976, Denise Couttès explained Hamilton's phenomenal success on page 6 of The Best of David Hamilton. His images, she wrote, "express escapism. People can only escape from the violence and cruelty of the modern world through dreams and nostalgia".
His soft focus style came back into fashion at Vogue, Elle, and other fashion magazines beginning around 2003. Hamilton had been in a relationship with Mona Kristensen (b. 1950), a model in many of his early photobooks who made her screen debut in Bilitis. Later, he married Gertrude Versyp, who co-designed The Age of Innocence, but they divorced amicably.
Hamilton divided his time between Saint-Tropez and Paris. He had been enjoying a revival in popularity since 2005. In 2006, David Hamilton, a collection of captioned photographs, and Erotic Tales, which contains Hamilton's fictional short stories, were published.