----------------- [excerpts from Jerry Hall: My life in pictures] -----------------
During this time I went on a three-week trip to India with Vogue Patterns and photographer Steve Horn. We did some enchanting photos but the dresses were pretty awful! I was happy to do it, because my mother used to make us dresses from Vogue Patterns, before she discovered the Frederick's of Hollywood catalogue. The dresses we took to India were very simple, which is why they put them in exotic locations, to make them look glamorous.
For one shot, Steve made me climb up onto the edge of a building and hang on. I really could have killed myself - we sometimes had to do crazy things while modelling.
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Norman Parkinson was an old-style gentleman photographer and I adored him. He had one of those old fashioned plate cameras in which the shutter is held open for a few minutes while it absorbs the light.
In that way it records a huge amount of movement.
I worked with him many times, but one of my favourite shoots was the one we did in Jamaica with Antonio and stylist Grace Coddington, for English Vogue.
I had invited Antonio along for the trip and it was Grace's idea to include him in the photographs. Parks used his special technique to photograph me and Antonio in a waterfall, with the water flowing behind us, so that the movement of the water was captured in a unique way. I had to stand in front of the waterfall for several minutes, but amazingly only my feet got wet!
We had great fun on that shoot. Antonio and I were such great friends and Grace and Parks were brilliant - we had some wonderful dinners in the evenings. Grace really was a genius artistically. I think she admired Antonio's work and wanted to do something with him, so she was delighted when I brought him along. Parks was quite old at that point, in his seventies. He hadn't really been considered a fashionable photographer until Grace revitalised his career by using him for Vogue.
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The Jamaican shoot was a fusion of brilliant people. Grace has a very pictorial eye, Antonio contributed a lot of ideas and Parks' photography was inspired. It was on that trip that we did what became known as the blue series, with the blue bikini and swimming cap and gold Manolo Blahnik shoes.
That resulted in my first English Vogue cover and 22 pages in the magazine. And it was these images which were spotted by Bryan Ferry, the lead singer of Roxy Music, who rang and asked me to appear on his next album cover.
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{Jerry Hall: My life in pictures. Curated by Jonathan Phang. Quadrille Publishing. Copyright 2010.}
an early portrait of The Beatles, by photographer Norman Parkinson
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