"It didn't matter what you flung at Bryan - a Middle East war, a Paris riot complete with CRS and tear gas, the Marbella Club in its infancy, an ageing roue, an iced-up trawler, a politician in press avoidance mode, the most sensitive of souls or the brashest of self-publicists, and of course a girl of any description - you knew absolutely that you would get work of the very highest quality. That he achieved this with great charm and lack of fuss was a bonus: it was always a delight to be on the road with Bryan."
Brian Moynahan The Sunday Times 2016
‘For ten years or so, Bryan Wharton photographed the world I wrote about as a columnist for The Sunday Times. Together we met hustlers and millionaires and tragedy queens and actors and authors and zoologists and beauties and a fair number of beasts.
Wharton had the Three Degrees dancing on a table top; the poet Ogden Nash (not the most jovial of men) actually grinning and John Aspinall, gambler and naturalist, wrestling with a Siberian tiger.
He helped to create situations which crystalised time and character and he photographed them briskly, wittily and entirely without the bullshit that too often attends image making.
Working with him was serious fun. His pictures show it.
Philip Oakes 1992 The Sunday Times.
The National Portrait Gallery has recently acquired a highly important and significant group of photographs from the archives of Bryan Wharton, the leading photojournalist, most of whose work was taken on assignment for The Sunday Times, and international magazines. The seventeen works include studies from the 1960s of Germaine Greer and The Goons (not previously represented) to the celebrated picture of Laurie Lee at the Chelsea Arts Club In the 1970s.
The works document historic moments in Britain’s social and cultural and help fill crucial holes in the N.P.G.’s collection. The acquisition is particularly timely. With the opening last year of an additional new wing to the National Portrait Gallery with a special Balcony Gallery devoted to changing displays from the 1960s 70s and 80s Bryan Wharton’s work will make a particularly useful addition.
Terence Pepper Curator of Photographs National Portrait Gallery.
On October 27th, a truly remarkable photograph of John Paul Getty goes on display at The National Portrait Gallery, where it’s talented creator, Bryan Wharton, is exhibiting his work from the Sixties and Seventies. To my knowledge, no one has gazed on that Getty portrait without experiencing a twitch of unease, if not dread.
The renowned artist Francis Bacon pinned the photograph to his studio wall, drew lines on it with the idea of committing something to canvas, but gave up, I fear, in despair. Wharton’s picture is hard to describe. But try imagining the facial expression of a rich man on the hump of a camel as it squeezes itself through the eye of a needle and you’ll get the point.
Sunday Business 2001
When I first met Bryan, assigned to work with me one frantic Saturday morning in 1964 on a hectic last-minute Sunday Times news story, he made a lousy impression. Surely to God this dandified bugger can't be the new photographer I thought, disappointed that my regular partner, Kelvin Brodie, was unavailable. For Bryan looked more Jermyn Street than Fleet Street. The man's hair was too exquisitely cut, his white trenchcoat improbably immaculate, as if delivered seconds before from central casting wrapped in cellophane And such aesthetic matters apart, where the hell were his bloody cameras.
I was writing an investigative story, the speciality of the house at the Times in those days, involving the Sultan of Zanzibar, recently deposed after a coup. This ex potentate had just touched down in London seeking asylum, escorted or more exactly surrounded by a colourful retinue worthy of Heile Selassie. We needed a picture of one of these courtiers in particular, the ex-prime minister, ideally without him or any of the other newsmen around knowing. All this I explained to Bryan as best I could, before fighting my way through to extract a few words from the royal casualty of history.
Later in the bar ( there always was a later, thank God, and also a bar) I made the error of assuming that Bryan had failed to get my drift, since I'd seen no sign of him shooting the guy in question, or anyone for that matter. 'You'll have to try and knock him up in his hotel room', I indicated. 'Don't worry,' Bryan said, in the tone of Ahazuerus tipping the beggar maid a tenner, 'It's all taken care of.'
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IN HIS HEYDAY, the Sixties, Bryan Wharton was a Fleet Street dandy as well as a star news and portrait photographer. His garments and gir1friends, equally exotic, dazzled all with whom he came into contact in those liberating years. He was a mixture of D'Artagnan (dash) and Peter Pan (agelessness): motto, Dum vivimus, vivamus (While we live, let us live). He was careless with money, drank prodigiously, was generous and loyal to his friends and, more often than not, admired by those he trapped in his lens and, if women, in his bed.
He also took remarkable photographs.
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The Times review of the Exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery. October 2001
We still associate the Sixties with certain looks and certain sounds—the jagged geometry of Mary Quant’s clothes, the Beatles travelling circus, Michael Caine playing Harry Palmer, Julie Christie’s Oscar winning performance in Darling and Mandy Rice- Davies in the dock. The Sixties was a decade all about optimism and change. After 15 years of post-war austerity, anew generation was coming of age to live out the dolce vita dreams of their parents. There was a redefining of attitudes. Barriers of class and conformity were being broken down.
In the photographic world Jonathon Miller wrote a lofty survey which described the “desperados of grainy blow-ups” with their “cool line and witty insolence of youth” Certainly the decade produced some of the finest troubadours of the medium. The National Portrait Gallery has put together a show of portrait photographs by three of the best, men whose work became part of the imagery that Swinging London presented to an intrigued world. One of them, Bryan Wharton was one of the star photographers of The Sunday Times underHarold Evans. These images of the fashionable, the famous and the notorious give us a sense of the enormous idealism and creativity of the age, the sense of new energies released amid great optimism, of young talents suffused with what the Americans enviously described as “uniquely English dash”. England won the World Cup and by the end of the decade, a man was walking on the Moon. For a time, fantastically, anything seemed possible.
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Possibly the most arresting of Bryan Wharton's work is his black and white chronicle of a multi coloured decade. His photographs of the Sixties are as nostalgic for those who cavorted then as they are inspiring for those too young to have done so. Unlike much in photojournalism, they easily resist being classified as ephemera. The lasting quality of Wharton's photography matches the lasting quality of his relationships with those who found themselves in his professional lens. Consequently, the great and the good who are his photographic subjects frequently become his steadfast friends: prime ministers and princesses, moguls and muses, actors and adventurers many entirely happy for us to remember them today as Wharton portrayed them years ago.
I got to know Wharton when we both worked for The Sunday Times, particularly under the editorship of Harold Evans who regarded Wharton as a star, both in terms of his professionalism and his.connections with the glitterati. Sometimes, in those days, I assumed that Wharton intimidated his more glamorous subjects into submission because he looked more glamorous (sartorially at least) than they.
But his gritty. achievements in other fields war, urban riot, the pursuit of international criminals dispelled the assumption and won him professional awards and public acclaim. Nevertheless, despite a cool, imaginative approach to his work, Wharton has a sense of mischief fuelled by his own and others' eccentricities. There is strong evidence of it in his book, magazine and newspaper photographs throughout the .Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. Delightfully, it is to be found in this exhibition too.
Cal McCrystal
He had the sense of the story, the instinct for the moment, and the balls to get close enough to capture it.
John Barry, Defence Correspondent, Newsweek Magazine.
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