David Bailey’s Look Again: The Autobiography places a photographer’s life inside the cultural upheavals that shaped his work. Published by Pan Macmillan in 2020, the book begins with his East End childhood, where dyslexia contributed to his being dismissed at school, and follows an unlikely route from work as a debt collector to the discovery of photography. Bailey recounts this ascent in his own voice, retaining the directness and irreverence associated with his public persona.

The decisive moment comes in 1960, when Bailey began making photographs for Vogue. He rejected the formality that had governed an earlier generation of fashion and portrait photography, drawing instead on the looseness and energy of London street culture. His account consequently extends beyond personal reminiscence: it describes a period in which fashion imagery, class mobility and celebrity were being renegotiated, and in which the photographer could become nearly as visible as the people before the camera.

Bailey’s circle gives that history its human scale. Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, the Krays and Queen Elizabeth II appear alongside Jean Shrimpton, Catherine Deneuve, Penelope Tree, Marie Helvin and Catherine Dyer. These encounters are not presented as a detached chronicle of famous names, but as parts of a life in which creative work, friendship, romance and notoriety repeatedly overlapped. His parallel work in film, documentary and advertising further broadens the portrait of a career sustained across several forms of image-making.

For a photography collection, Look Again offers something different from a monograph organized around finished pictures. Its importance lies in the first-person framework it supplies for understanding Bailey’s formation, his break with inherited conventions and the social world surrounding his practice. The 384-page hardcover is particularly relevant to readers interested in British photography, Vogue, fashion culture and the mythology of 1960s London: a substantial autobiographical companion through which a familiar body of work can be reconsidered from its maker’s perspective.