The Times Magazine, Saturday February 7th, 2004
Getting Close To
Twiggy
Photographer: Richard Traeger
Year: 1967
Location: London
| Ronald Traeger, the fashion photographer, took these shots of
Twiggy in February 1967 when she was 18. "Twiggy was a very clever and talented young woman," recalls Traeger's widow, Tessa.
"She was very smart and also very carefully protected. She was picked up by minicab for modelling jobs, chaperoned by her agent
and taken straight back to her parents' home afterwards. She wasn't
at all involved in the kind of Sixties photography scene you might
imagine from the film Blowup." Traeger photographed Twiggy frequently during her four-year modelling career. "They became real friends because he treated women as equals: he didn't regard her as a sexual object. as a dolly bird, which was the accepted thing at that time. Thats why they got on so well." The American-born Traeger, who died from Hodgkin's disease in 1968, aged 31, at the height of his career was fascinated with pose and gesture. As a trained mime artist himself, he encouraged his models to mime and act. Here Traeger has captured that devastating combination of doe-like androgynous beauty with an intense, experienced sexuality: a kind of Bambi in black suspenders. "I think the respect he showed Twiggy comes through in these shots. Shes looking at him with total trust. She was not naive, she knew what she was doing: and she was strangely unselfconscious. She was most unusual. You could put her anywhere and she would always be happy. JOANNA PITMAN |
