When Terence Donovan committed suicide in November 1996, there was widespread shock within the overlapping worlds of British fashion and photography. And yet, while still working successfully in both, Donovan was no longer a central player in either. The nature of his death remains unexplained - and largely undiscussed - but given that he had recently turned 60, it seems more than possible that his increasingly peripheral status in fields where he had once been been a dominant figure would have caused him much distress.
When Terence Donovan first began to achieve widespread fame for his work in the early 1960s, he was usually bracketed with two other London East End boys also working as photographers: David Bailey and Brian Duffy.
Cecil Beaton, in his 1973 history of photography, The Magic Image, called this trio "The Terrible Three" and described how "three cockney boys rushed out of the somewhat staid John French's darkroom and gave a signature to their times." Beaton's comments on Donovan et al were somewhat tinged with regret and envy but, ever the self-invented gentleman, his criticisms of a younger generation usurping what had once been his inviolable position, were restrained. Not so Donovan's remarks about those whom he regarded as pretenders to his throne: never a man of restrained speech, he would denounce photographers thrown up by successive decades in ripe language.
The truth is that, as so often happens, having begun as a radical, he became a conservative. In Donovan's case, this was also the case politically; among his idols was Margaret Thatcher who, it has been pointed out, he regularly photographed in the romantic style of Annigoni's portrait of Elizabeth II.
The character of Donovan's work also grew increasingly conservative, not least because he took on so many commercial jobs in which the dictates of another party had to be acknowledged. Nothing so clearly illustrates the reactionary nature of his later years than Donovan's direction of Robert Palmer's video for Addicted to Love in which thin (but full-bosomed) models wearing not very much clothing clustered around the singer while pretending to play guitars. It could be, and was, argued that the video served as an exercise in irony, but this is a poor excuse for jaded sexual chauvinism.
Donovan's pictures from the 1960s, on the other hand, especially those taken for the new magazines of the period such as Town and Queen, were dazzlingly fresh and reflected his own hard-edged origins. The further he removed himself from the East End, the more his work suffered. Success, in this instance, was not beneficial to art.
Robert O'Byrne is an Irish Times journalist and the author of After a Fashion : A History of the Irish Fashion Industry published by Town House.