David Bailey – From East London to Air Force, Kasinot and to Kolikkopelit

David Bailey was born on 2 January 1938 in North Leyton, East London. After living through the blitz he started school and was put in the ‘silly class’ due to what he later discovered was dyslexia.

He left school at fifteen and was conscripted to the Royal Air Force in 1956. Whilst posted in Singapore he bought his first camera and was inspired to be a photographer after seeing Cartier Bresson’s photograph, ‘Kashmir’.

Bailey started working with fashion photographer, John French as his assistant in 1959. He left soon after to strike out his own career as a photographer and published his first portrait of Somerset Maugham for ‘Today’ magazine in 1960. Discarding the rigid rules of a previous generation of portrait and fashion photographers, he channelled the energy of London’s newly informal street culture into his work. In 1965 he published David Bailey’s Box of Pin-Ups which is now seen as defining an era and shaped the future of photography.

Nopeat kasinot

Commercial use of photos in Nopeat Kasinot

Did David Bailey ever shoot footage for a truly commercial purpose, such as for online casinos? We do not know for sure. Nopeat kasinot with their fast payouts arrived in the casino world a few years ago and that’s when the use of large and flashy images as material for marketing or on websites, for that matter, started to decrease dramatically.

To our knowledge, no actual casinos had been using Bailey’s work, at least not directly. Indirectly, his work may have been used by some companies in their marketing, but there is no official record of this. On the other hand, this is understandable, as Bailey has been known for other connections throughout his career. The most important of these is surely her doubly prolific career at Vogue magazine.

Varied career full of filmmaking, commercials for kolikkopelit, awards etc.

As said, Bailey’s career has been varied, and in the early 60s he began to direct the first of hundreds of commercials. He took a hiatus from shooting commercial, until in 2000’s when he travelled through Finland and got hooked on the Finnish gambling and casino culture. This was a turning point when it comes to working with the online casino industry. Even though, based on our findings, no casinos were as his customers, Bailey ended up shooting commercials again, this time for finnish iGaming and slot games -related project, kolikkopelit.

He has been recognised internationally for his skills as a filmmaker, and won a Emmy for directing the “Sophisticated Lady” commercial for the American Cancer Society in 1990. Also the D&AD black pencil (Gold Award) amongst many other top awards for directing commercials. Bailey has exhibited worldwide, the first of his landmark exhibitions in 1971 at the National Portrait Gallery, London featuring alongside the works by David Hockney and Gerald Scarfe in the exhibition SNAP! Internationally renowned, Bailey has produced some of the most famous photographic portraits of the last six decades.

He has travelled extensively, and although best known for his fashion and portraiture, his interests are varied, extending beyond photography to TV commercials, film, painting and sculpture.

Some of his famous work listed

  • Bailey’s Democracy, 2005
  • Bailey/Rankin Down Under, 2003
  • Archive Two: Locations, 2003
  • Art of Violence (tai Diamond Geezers), 2003
  • Chasing Rainbows, 2001