IMAGES TO ONLY BE USED IN PRESS IN CONJUNCTION WITH ZEBRA ONE GALLERY FOR THE TERRY O'NEILL: THE VINTAGE COLLECTION EXHIBITION Singer David Bowie shares a cigarette with actress Elizabeth Taylor in Beverly Hills, 1975. It was the first occasion that the pair had met.

TERRY O’NEILL: THE VINTAGE COLLECTION EXHIBITION

ZEBRA ONE GALLERY RETROSPECTIVE UNVEILS PREVIOUSLY UNSEEN IMAGES OF ICONS 

To celebrate the life of late, great photographer Terry O’Neill, Zebra One Gallery will launch retrospective exhibition, Terry O’Neill: The Vintage Collection, featuring rare or previously unseen images of icons including David Bowie, Elton John, Raquel Welch, The Beatles and outtakes from some of his most famous Brigitte Bardot and Faye Dunaway shoots.

Copyrights: ZEBRA ONE GALLERY FOR THE TERRY O’NEILL: THE VINTAGE COLLECTION EXHIBITION
The Beatles perform at a special midnight show, “The Night of a Hundred Stars”. In part one of the show, The Beatles act out a “flying ballet” sketch, which involves them being raised up high above the stage on wires. In part two of the show, they perform a brief musical set, London Palladium, 1964.

 In the last five years, his archive of two million negatives has been revisited, unearthing rare, vintage prints of some of history’s most pivotal celebrity moments. Thirteen particularly exciting, signed images will be unveiled for this exhibition, which runs at the Hampstead gallery from 15 – 29 September. Many of these have never been seen before and with the death of the photographer last year, his work can no longer be reproduced in terms of chemistry, paper quality or authenticity. 

The show includes a unique contact sheet (the only known print in existence) of a now-legendary 1974 David Bowie shoot, signed by both Bowie and O’Neill, who described the singer as his “creative muse” and captured his shapeshifting evolution from Ziggy Stardust to the Thin White Duke and beyond. 

The Los Angeles shoot was to promote Bowie’s Diamond Dogs Tour and shows the star smoking, in a yellow suit. On the recto of the contact sheet are the initials ‘DB’ in Chinagraph, indicating Bowie’s favourite image from the shoot, which was later gifted to him by O’Neill. 

It also features extraordinary contact sheets, featuring outtakes from two of his most famous shoots. One shows actress Faye Dunaway (his girlfriend at the time) at dawn in 1977, lounging next to the swimming pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel the morning after winning an Academy Award. The other shows a series of outtakes from the iconic image of Brigitte Bardot, smoking a cigar with the wind blowing through her hair. 

It also features a 1975 shot of Elizabeth Taylor and David Bowie in Los Angeles. Taylor was desperate to meet Bowie, so she asked O’Neill – who knew everybody – to bring him to lunch, because she wanted him to star in her next film. He was four hours late for the lunch, leaving the Hollywood superstar fuming. But, thanks to her love for O’Neill, Taylor still agreed to shoot some sultry and spectacular shots with the rockstar, who won her over. He did not get the part in the movie and the session remained buried and unseen, until it was rediscovered by Terry forty years later. 

Another image shows an outtake from press shots for 1971 comedy western Pocket Money, shot in Arizona and starring Paul Newman and Lee Marvin. O’Neill revealed that Marvin was mostly indisposed due to alcohol during the making of the film and refused to come out of his trailer. But he made an exception for O’Neill. As Marvin was a much larger man than Newman, O’Neill persuaded him to bend slightly at the knee and encouraged Newman to stretch up straight so that they both appeared the same size, in the shoot. 

Copyrights: ZEBRA ONE GALLERY FOR THE TERRY O’NEILL: THE VINTAGE COLLECTION EXHIBITION
American singer and actor Frank Sinatra on set during the making of ‘The Lady In Cement’ in Miami, 1968.

Other stars in the exhibition include: The Beatles with Laurence Olivier, Marlene Dietrich, Elton John and Davey Johnstone, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland and Liza Minelli, Raquel Welch, Robert Redford and Richard Helms and Roger Daltrey. 

Over six decades, O’Neill earned a place atop the pantheon of history-making, iconic British photographers. He forged long lasting relationships with everybody from Frank Sinatra, Michael Caine, Raquel Welch and Faye Dunaway – who he married – and is the only photographer to have photographed every actor to play James Bond and every British Prime Minister from Winston Churchill to Gordon Brown. He captured The Beatles and The Rolling Stones at the beginning of their careers and documented the most influential film, music and political faces of our time. 

The work of Terry O’Neill is held in national and private collections with no fewer than 75 portraits in London’s National Portrait Gallery alone. 

These iconic pieces are available from Zebra One Gallery and the exhibition runs from 15-29 September.

Zebra One Gallery

73a Perrin’s Ct

Hampstead High St

Hampstead

London NW3 1QX

https://zebraonegallery.com

Images Courtesy: Terry O’Neill / Iconic Images

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