Vaughan_book

KEITH VAUGHAN 

ON PAGHAM BEACH, PHOTOGRAPHS 

AND COLLAGES FROM THE 1930s

KEITH VAUGHAN 

ON PAGHAM BEACH, PHOTOGRAPHS 

AND COLLAGES FROM THE 1930s 

Austin / Desmond Fine Art 

Pied Bull Yard, 68/69 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3BN 

+44(0)20 7242 4443 

austindesmond.com

2

Philip Wright 

Keith Vaughan: the Pagham photographs 

This essay draws unashamedly, and with grateful acknowledgement, on five principal publications: 

the artist’s own Journal & drawings (edited by Alan Ross), Malcolm Yorke’s monograph Keith 

Vaughan: his life and work, Emmanuel Cooper’s Fully exposed: the male nude in photography, 

Philip Vann and Gerard Hastings’ monograph Keith Vaughan and Gerard Hastings’ Keith Vaughan: 

the photographs. This last publication and that author’s subsequent book Awkward artefacts: the 

‘erotic fantasies’ of Keith Vaughan illustrate how much of Vaughan’s work, both seen and possibly 

still unseen, was left behind in the artist’s studio and house after his death. Some of this work 

has since been sold, otherwise dispersed, or given to named and possibly also to unnamed 

friends. Other materials that are known to exist, such as the artist’s ‘Manual on masturbation’, 

may be unlikely to find an official publisher. However, a further substantial and valuable collection 

of drawings, photographs, prints and commercial design and illustration projects has also been 

assembled by the University of Wales Art Gallery at Aberystwyth, to which we are grateful for 

having been given access. 

previous page, inside front cover: 

Floating boy [P21] (detail) 

printed on postcard paper 

8.7 x 13.8 cm 

The contents of this exhibition came from the great-nephew of Tracy, formerly Bernard, Stamp 1 – 

doubtless an acquaintance or possibly a friend of the artist – and perhaps gifted to Bernard in 

the late 1960s after Alan Ross’ publication of the edition he had prepared of the artist’s journal. 

A few of the ‘Pagham photographs’ in our exhibition were – daringly, at that date – included in 

Ross’s book, in which it was also noted that the collection of photographs that had been given to 

the printer, the Shenval Press, were never returned, and were therefore presumed lost. 2 Whether 

the collection here is, or mirrors, that lost collection, is unclear. The majority of the photos, printed 

on postcard material that was commonly available to photographers at that time, do not seem to 

have appeared in publications on the artist up till now. 3 While the author of the photographs 

cannot be in doubt – this collection contains a few of the six photographs published in the 

Journal & drawings – whether they are ‘original’ prints by Vaughan himself cannot be proved 

beyond a doubt. However, the existence within the set of a couple of different exposures of the 

same image, and some proposed croppings drawn in pencil on a few of the images, suggest the 

artist’s hand at work. 4 Furthermore, the flimsy black-painted cardboard box containing the collection 

of photographs would appear to be hand-made and was clearly labelled in the artist’s hand 5 . 

previous page: 

Self Portrait [P26] 


13.8 x 8.7 cm 

left: 

Dick (solarised) [P1] 

photographic print on Agfa Brovira paper 

30.2 x 25 cm 

NOTES 

1 Bernard Stamp became only the second person in Britain to undergo a sex change in 1952. 

2 Gerard Hastings, Keith Vaughan: the photographs, Pagham Press, 2013, p. 81. 

3 Hastings, ibid., p. 82. 

4 see cat. nos. P1, P15 and P32. 

5 see back cover. 

3

4

I 

Until the successful passage of the Sexual Offences Act in 1967, decriminalizing homosexual 

acts in private between two men, both of whom had to be 21 or over – a full thirteen years after 

the Conservative government had first asked a department committee chaired by John 

Wolfenden to give fresh consideration to the law relating to homosexuality and prostitution – 

homosexual acts between consenting adults, even in private, had been illegal and were 

therefore liable to criminal prosecution. It had taken more than eighty years for section 11 of 

the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, introduced by Henry Labouchère after a series of 

tabloid-magnified ‘scandals’, to be abolished. Section 11 prescribed up to two years 

imprisonment with or without hard labour for ‘gross indecency between males in public or in 

private’. It was this that would be inflicted, for example, with tragic consequences on Oscar 

Wilde and, much later, used to persecute the gifted mathematician Alan Turing, driving him to 

suicide. 

For Vaughan, as for the majority of homosexuals for most of the twentieth century – with the 

exception of those at the very top and bottom of the social scale – life was lived between two 

worlds: the exterior world of social conventions, heterosexual marriage and procreation, and the 

interior world of discreet glances, of furtive and dangerously fraught encounters for sex, of fear 

of discovery and shame of prosecution for emotional needs and desires. Of a school-time 

friend, Vaughan later recalled: ‘I learnt from him the fear, tension and repression that 

surrounded everything to do with sex’ 1 . This is not the place to attempt any deeper analysis of 

Vaughan’s persona or psychological make-up in his early years, but while his own occasional 

brief reminiscences in his Journal shed light on his shyness and self-doubt, others’ perceptions 

of him at this time indicate how he coped, as many closeted homosexuals did then, by 

projecting a different, more insouciant persona. He had apparently been lonely, reserved, and 

inevitably bullied at his school, and he later wrote that for him his time at Christ’s Hospital 

School had merely represented ‘eight years of concrete misery and romantic reveries’, 2 and that 

the experience had left him ‘with a lasting fear of hostility in others, a mistrust of strangers, and 

a maddening desire at all costs to ingratiate myself and earn the goodwill of everyone, however 

much I might secretly dislike and despise them’. 3 

Male portrait behind fishing net [PL7] 

photographic print on unmarked paper 

30.2 x 25.2 cm 

Vaughan’s father had abandoned the family when the boy was about eight years old. Vaughan 

remained close to his mother, living in the same house until the end of the 1930s. Yorke and 

others have wondered whether the disappearance of his father before Vaughan was ten years 

old, and the need to protect his overly timid younger brother Richard (known as Dick) in his 

early years, may have cast him in the role of a father figure to younger men. 4 With the exception 

of the affair he began with Harold Colebrook (whose aunt had the converted railway carriage at 

Pagham beach, where most of the photographs in this exhibition were taken) and with whom 

he shared many cultural interests, Vaughan was quite openly attracted to younger workingclass 

men with a rough edge, such as Len and his brother Stan, the grocer’s boy Percy Farrant, 

and in later years, the sometime boxer and small-time criminal Johnny Walsh – all of whom 

would at one time also model for him to photograph. 

5

Vaughan’s mother had been educated in a Belgian convent, and spoke both French and 

German, as well as English. Both Keith and his younger brother Dick would also master French 

and German, going to stay with family friends, the Bellingers, in Berlin in 1930, three years 

before Hitler came to power, and once again before the outbreak of war in 1939. Keith would 

travel alone to Paris, Cassis and Toulon in 1937, the year of the Paris World Fair. 5 At this Fair 

the most monumental pavilions, those of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, memorably 

confronted each other, and the Spanish Republic’s pavilion famously housed Picasso’s Guernica, 

as well as major works by Miró and Calder. It is not known, however, whether Vaughan actually 

visited the Fair. In 1938 the family also spent Christmas in Austria (after Hitler had been 

enthusiastically welcomed back in his homeland). What effect these travels and experiences 

had on the artist is nowhere recorded. 

One year after leaving school, Vaughan joined Lintas (Lever International Advertising Services), 

the recently re-branded advertising department of Unilever, which up till then had been mainly 

tasked with purchasing advertising space rather than designing its own advertisements. 6 The 

task was now to work on promoting its own toiletries and cooking fats. It is not recorded 

precisely how or why Vaughan entered this agency, but with the Depression and unemployment 

levels growing in severity by 1931, several young artists of promise such as Graham Sutherland, 

John Piper and John Banting would take up commissions or employment in advertising during 

that sombre decade. 

The practice of using art for advertising was of course not new, though it had been somewhat 

haphazardly exploited towards the end of the previous century; with Toulouse-Lautrec and Jules 

Chéret, for example, in France, or the Beggarstaff Brothers (William Nicholson and James 

Pryde) in Britain. In 1889 William, later Lord Lever purchased William Powell Frith’s latest 

painting The New Frock 7 at the Royal Academy, which he used as a poster image to advertise his 

Sunlight Soap – tag-line ‘So clean’ – much to the artist’s disgust. Around 1900 his American 

business partner Sidney Gross would also employ well-known magazine illustrators such as Phil 

May, Lawson Wood and the Punch cartoonist Bernard Partridge to promote Lever Bros. 

products. However, Len Sharpe, the compiler of The Lintas Story, has explained that ‘the artists 

of the 20s were unapologetically commercial men, not fine artists allowing their creations to be 

used for commercial purposes’. 8 So much so that in 1934 the artist Leon Underwood would 

characterize commercial art as employing ‘cache-toi aesthetics to tell magnificent lies about 

commodities’ 9 – in Lintas’s case, soaps and margarine. 

Sharpe went on to write that ‘The Lintas staff, located in Unilever House, were conspicuous 

among the other occupants of that rather solemn and majestic headquarters. They dressed and 

behaved as the whim took them. There was the sandaled and sockless visualizer who struck a 

bizarre note among the dark suits and umbrellas in the Unilever elevators. Sometimes outbursts 

of exuberance during office hours scandalized the managers of more formal departments who 

could observe these carefree antics across the well of the great building.’ 10 

It seems that as a trainee layout artist 11 Vaughan joined a team with diverse skills and interests, 

a few of whom would remain friends for many years after the artist had left Lintas. They 

included an Australian, John Passmore, and a New Zealander, Felix Kelly, both of whom were 

trained artists with exhibiting careers. It was another trained artist-member of the Lintas team, 

Reg Jenkins, who, seeing Vaughan’s interest in photography, persuaded him to buy a Leica 

6

A male figure kicking, draped in wet cloth [P1] 

printed on postcard paper, with pencil marking 

8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Boy in fishing net [P3] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Len with towel [P2] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Boy holding up fishing net [P4] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

7

Ballet rehearsal No.4 [BR4] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

camera, with which he would over the years shoot ‘hundreds of feet of camera roll’, notably at 

the ballet and at Pagham beach. It appears that Vaughan had started to take photographs with a 

medium-format reflex camera while still at school. By 1932 he had installed his own darkroom 

in the family home, which he would also be able to use as a studio setting for photographing his 

young models. It isn’t known what model of Leica he purchased, as it was stolen sometime after 

1939 and he never replaced it. 

Although a prototype Leica using 35 mm film had been produced before World War I, the Leica 

model I would not go into production before 1925. Model II appeared in 1932, now with a builtin 

rangefinder and a set of interchangeable lenses. It was this model that the likes of Cartier- 

Bresson, André Kertész and Leni Riefenstahl would use. Andreas, the son of the painter and 

Bauhaus teacher Lyonel Feininger, published Menschen vor der Kamera, the first detailed 

manual for 35 mm photography in 1934, which was followed by Theo Kisselbach’s Il Libro della 

Leica in the following year. The popularity of the camera was greatly enhanced by Paul Wolff’s 

sequence of publications, which first appeared in German and were issued almost immediately 

in four other language editions; in England as My first ten years with the Leica in 1934, What I 

saw at the 1936 Olympic Games in the same year, and Work! in 1937. Whether Vaughan had 

seen or possessed any of these is not known, though with his interest in photography, his use of 

a Leica and his knowledge of German, it is more than possible. 

His friend John Passmore later reminisced about Vaughan’s ‘vivacity, his love of music [Vaughan 

was an accomplished pianist] and his wonderful mobility while dancing … it was such a brilliant 

thing. He was very close to a Diaghilev dancer’. 12 Passmore might have been referring to the 

prima ballerinas Toumanova or Danilova, whom Vaughan had befriended, once taking the former 

down to Pagham beach with his friends. 13 Presumably it was this very friendship with the prima 

ballerinas that had enabled Vaughan to attend, and then to photograph, some ballet rehearsals 

[see cat. no. BR4]. He was also able to take some photographs of live performances from the 

far sides of the stalls or circle, at least one of which is known to have been included in a 1930s 

book on ballet, 14 and others which he appears to have produced for sale in the same postcard 

format as the Pagham beach photographs. 15 

In July 1929 Vaughan had gone with his mother to Covent Garden to see what proved to be 

Serge Diaghilev’s last production for the Ballets Russes, Prokofiev’s Le Fils Prodigue, with the 

Standing nude model [PL2] 

photographic print laid on card 

30.2 x 20 cm (photograph), 

30.2 x 25 cm (card) 

8

9

Boy under beached ship hull [P5] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Young man lying on cot [P7] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Two male figures, one throwing [P6] 

printed on postcard paper (inverted) 

8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Male nude on white rocks [P8] 

printed on postcard paper, indistinct pencil inscription verso 

8.7 x 13.8 cm 

10

Boy under beached ship hull II [P9] 

printed on postcard paper, inscribed in pencil verso ‘Sily(?) Solo’ 

8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Boy under beached ship hull III [P11] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Len with towel II [P10] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Young man at water’s edge with raised arm [P12] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

11

Dick Vaughan [P13] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

A young man beside a corrugated shed, holding oars [P28] 

printed on postcard paper, inverted 

8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Dick Vaughan holding dead branch [P42] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Fishing boats [P59] 

printed on postcard paper, inverted 

8.7 x 13.8 cm 

12

lead danced by Serge Lifar, and striking sets designed by Rouault. Diaghilev died the following 

month. That great impresario had created the male ballet lead, making a star out of Nijinsky and 

later Lifar and, by commissioning or bringing together new music scores, new scenery by 

contemporary artists and new movements in choreography, had led ballet to become a leading 

focus for artistic creativity in the interwar years. The ballet, more even than classical music 

concerts, provided a well-known haunt, or at least a less fraught socialising space for homosexuals 

– ‘is he musical?’ being one of the codes for hinting at homosexual leanings. It was at the ballet 

that Vaughan first met Harold Colebrook, and where they both could unashamedly admire the 

almost naked athletic figures of the dancers. 

Just before the outbreak of war, at the age of 27, Vaughan decided to keep a journal. He kept it 

up until the very day of his death by suicide almost forty years later. Although he managed some 

level of privacy in his locked photographic darkroom in the house, his mother would meet and 

entertain his male visitors, and later come to understand the nature of his relationships and yet, 

paradoxically, she receives hardly a mention in the published journal. There are no entries in the 

Journal before 1940 that mention colleagues from the Lintas office. Yorke gathered information 

about Vaughan’s socializing with them from later interviews with a few of his former colleagues, 

but it is also possible that editing of the Journal by Alan Ross or Vaughan’s close friend, the 

artist Prunella Clough, prior to its publication may account for some puzzling lacunae. 

Introducing Alan Ross’s 1966 edition of his Journal & drawings Vaughan wrote: ‘When I began 

writing this journal in 1939, it was certainly not with the thought that it might be published and 

possibly even read. Its purpose was therapeutic and consolatory’ 16 . By 1972, however, the artist 

had decided: ‘The whole purpose of this journal is to reveal myself as fully as possible to future 

readers whom I shall never know … I shall write with the intention of being read 17 …. I have not 

suppressed opinions I no longer hold, or attitudes of mind which are now embarrassing, if they 

seem true of their time.’ 18 His biographer, Malcolm Yorke explained that ‘Vaughan believed that 

his works would be illuminated if the viewer knew what the artist was feeling, thinking, believing 

and suffering at the time he created them.’ 19 However, such was Vaughan’s sense of discretion 

about others, as opposed to himself and his feelings, that hardly any of his male acquaintances 

or friends are mentioned in the published Journal. Nor, surprisingly perhaps, do events of 

national or international importance feature in the Journal. Despite Vaughan’s choice of 

conscientious objection in World War II, there is no evidence that he found the geopolitical 

turmoil of this period a source of interest. 

Sadly, in the context of interpreting this collection, Vaughan’s Journal postdates the decade of 

the 1930s when the works in this exhibition were created. An occasional retrospective 

reminiscence is all that survives first hand, and these are markedly self-critical. Recalling the 

years at Lintas, Vaughan wrote ‘the cowlike docility with which I had hung on there for eight 

years … lacking the courage to break away … through my fastidiousness and high demands, I 

was always frustrated and dissatisfied so I turned inwards’ 20 All too aware of the contradictions 

of his existence, he confessed: ‘I refused to submit to the ideas and principles of commerce, but 

I worked in commerce. I refused the way of life at home, but I lived at home. I chose my friends 

spontaneously and haphazardly from all societies and classes, and so became a stranger in all 

societies …’ 21 

13

As an aside, it is interesting to note how during the 1930s the ‘eccentric’ behaviour of Cecil 

Beaton and his close circle of high-society friends such as the composer Lord Berners, the art 

collector Peter Watson, the actor John Gielgud or the artistic, outrageous dilettante Brian 

Howard would be tolerated with humour by the public, and even a young left-leaning set around 

Auden, Isherwood, Spender and Britten would gain some public respect for their work, but 

Vaughan does not seem to have had an entrée into either of these homosexual circles. The 

Lintas team may have been seen as an ‘eccentric’ group within the conventional norms of the 

Unilever workforce, but Vaughan could well have been intimidated by the sort of vicious – we 

would call it ‘homophobic’ today – reaction that, for example, was met by some critics in 1933 to 

a play addressing the theme of homosexuality. Mordaunt Shairp’s The Green Bay Tree featured 

as a central character ‘a screaming and thoroughly nasty creature who “corrupts” a young Welsh 

boy he has adopted. Even though he gets his just deserts and is murdered at the end, the critics 

were in uproar.’ 22 Under headings such as ‘Plays that ought to be burnt’, ‘Play of the abnormal. 

Repulsive topic …’ the critic J.C. wrote ‘the whole thing must be repugnant to the normal 

individual, and therefore I can only deplore the presentation of this play’, although another critic 

conceded the playwright’s skill but could only ‘commend his play to all who do not find his theme 

irreparably distasteful’. In the light of the punitive Labouchère amendment, better therefore for a 

shy gay man like Vaughan to remain closeted, unless one enjoyed a level of fame and 

recognition like that of the Beaton set, or the level of acclaim bestowed on intellectuals of the 

Auden set. 

Such was Vaughan’s dissatisfaction with his twenties that he dismissed them as merely ‘years of 

dilettantism, piano playing, writing, ballet, reading. There was no system, no real progress.’ 23 In 

spite of this, he evidently continued to read widely, including French and German in the original, 

as well as other foreign authors in translation. Vann mentions Goethe, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, 

Chekhov, Proust, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarmé. 24 Touchingly, in the midst of the 

darkest year of the war, 1941, among sketches of human suffering and scenes recording bomb 

destruction, Vaughan inscribed lines in German from Rilke’s ‘Duineser Elegien’: 

‘Nirgends, Geliebte, wird Welt sein, als innen’, 

‘Eines ist die Geliebte zu singen. Ein anderes, wehe’, 

‘Gib ihm die Nächte Übergewicht – verhalt ihn’, and 

‘Die Szenerie war Abschied. Leicht zu verstehen’. 25 

These masterpieces of twentieth-century poetry are acknowledged to be difficult fully to fathom, 

even in the original German, and virtually impossible to do justice to in translation. Vaughan’s 

discerning choice of lines hint at love, longing and loss, pain and suffering, and the shrouding 

weight of night. 

14

Bather and biplane [P14] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Bather fastening sandal [P16] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

A male figure in silhouette holding wet cloth [P15] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Young man at water’s edge [P17] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

15

Male nude standing beside deckchair [P19] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Young man doing a handstand on deckchair [P49] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

A male figure walking on a plank [P18] 

printed on postcard paper, inscribed in pencil verso ‘Sily(?) Solo’ 

8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Floating boy [P21] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

16

NOTES 

Between 1939 and 1977 Keith Vaughan wrote a total of 61 Journals, from 48 of which Alan Ross made a selection (eleven 

years before the artist’s death). Ross edited and published his selection in 1966 at the Shenval Press in Harlow, Essex. 

Vaughan’s biographer, Malcolm Yorke had access to the complete set of journals, and these are referred to in his 

monograph as ‘Journal’, followed by the volume number, page number and entry date; e.g. ‘Journal 4-6, 11 August 1940’, as 

also below. 

1 Unsourced quotation recorded by Malcolm Yorke, Keith Vaughan: his life and work, London 1990, p. 29. 

2 Yorke, ibid., p. 32. 

3 From an undated manuscript entitled ‘M’s childhood’, quoted by Yorke, ibid., p. 32. 

4 Yorke, ibid., p. 26. 

5 Its official title was the ‘Exposition des Arts et des Techniques de la Vie Moderne’. 

6 Lintas was the agency that launched the first commercial radio programmes from Radio Luxembourg in the early 

1930s. Later in that decade it was one of the leading agencies producing its own in-house advertisements for 

cinema showing, including the first in colour (for Persil, according to its historian Len Sharpe: see footnote 8 below). 

7 Now in the collection of Liverpool’s National Museums. 

8 Len Sharpe, The Lintas Story: impressions and recollections, London 1964, p. 18. 

9 THIRTIES: British art and design before the war, Arts Council of Great Britain and Victoria & Albert Museum, 1979-80. 

10 Sharpe, ibid., p. 52. 

11 ‘According to the 1930s thriller by Dorothy L. Sayers Murder must advertise, a new employee [in an advertising 

agency] would find that the aim of the studio artist was ‘to crowd the copy out of the advertisement’. The copywriter’s 

ambition was ‘to cram the space with verbiage’ and leave no room for the illustration. The layout man ‘spent a 

wretched life trying to reconcile these opposing parties’, in Richard Hollis et al., Ashley Havinden: advertising and the 

artist, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh 2003, p. 28. 

12 Yorke, op. cit., p. 39. 

13 See cat. nos. P70 and P71, possibly Toumanova. 

14 Yorke, op. cit., p. 47; Cyril M. Beaumont’s Complete Book of Ballets London 1937, p. 880. The collection at the 

University Art Gallery of Wales includes 35 photographs of ballet performances, including Le Tricorne with sets and 

costumes by Picasso. 

15 The postcard size cat. no. P37 bears the inscription ‘2/6’ on the reverse, while the larger print, cat. no. PL11 is 

inscribed ‘5/-’, also on the reverse. 

16 Keith Vaughan: Journal & drawings edited and published by Alan Ross 1966, p. 7. 

17 Journal 54-36, 28 January 1972, quoted by Yorke, op. cit. , p. 18. 

18 Vaughan, ed. Ross, ibid., p. 8. 

19 Yorke, op. cit., p. 16. 

20 Journal, 4 November 1940, quoted in Philip Vann and Gerard Hastings, Keith Vaughan, London 2012. 

21 Journal 4-6, 11 August 1940, quoted by Yorke, op. cit., p. 49. 

22 Reviews reproduced in James Gardiner, Who’s a pretty boy then?, London (1996). 

23 Journal 15-12, 23 May 1943, quoted by Yorke, op. cit., p. 51. 

24 Vann and Hastings, op. cit., p. 41. 

25 Vaughan, ed. Ross, op. cit., p. 55. 

17

Man and oil drum [PL3] 


25 x 30.2 cm 

18

Young man doing a handstand [P22] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Figure swimming in shallow water [P24] 

printed on postcard paper (inverted), inscribed in pencil verso ‘Water’ 

8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Two male figures, one drying his face with towel [P23] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Naked male figure on beach, muscular pose [P27] 

printed on unidentified paper 

9.8 x 13.8 cm 

19

A male figure draped full length in wet cloth [P32] 

printed on postcard paper with pencil marking 

8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Male bather pulling on a coat [P35] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Len eating a melon [P33] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Two male figures one throwing [P37] 

printed on postcard paper (inverted), inscribed ‘2/6’ in ink verso 

8.7 x 13.8 cm 

20

Two male figures on a beach [PC1] 

gouache and photograph on card 

30 x 25.5 cm 

21

Smiling man with hands on head [PC2] 

gouache and photograph on card, small collage of beached boat verso 

30 x 25.5 cm 

22

Figure lying on beach at night [PC3] 


30.5 x 25.5 cm 

23

Male figure seated on wooden breakwater [PC4] 

ink, gouache and photograph on card, signed with address top right 

30 x 25 cm 

24

Four figures on a beach [PC5] 

ink and gouache on photograph on card 

30.2 x 25 cm 

25

Seated naked figure on beach [PC6] 

ink, gouache and photographe on card 

30.5 x 25.5 cm 

26

Male figure seated against sky [PC7] 


30.4 x 25.7 cm 

27

Len seated on beach beside deckchair [P38] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

A male figure, drying himself on the beach [P41] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

A male figure wearing loincloth standing at water’s edge [P39] 

printed on postcard paper (inverted), embossed markings 

8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Two male figures in silhouette, one holding wet cloth [P43] 


9.8 x 13.8 cm 

28

II 

Emmanuel Cooper has explained in his comprehensive study Fully exposed: the male nude in 

photography how the choice of the (male) nude as a subject coincided with the birth of photography 

itself, as soon as the model could show that s/he could hold the pose for the necessary length of 

the camera’s exposure. Not only had many of the first photographers originally studied as artists, 

but also they saw photographing the nude as a substitute for, and even an improvement on, the 

pose of a living model in the studio. The photograph could offer more realistic, ‘truthful’ varieties 

of poses that could be captured and held in permanence. The pioneers in this genre included 

Julien Vallou de Villeneuve, Eugène Durieu and Guglielmo Marconi, followed by collections of 

naked poses by the likes of Louis Igout and Albert Loude, amongst others. Many of their 

photographs would become commercially available in single prints and postcards. 

The constant and rapid improvement of cameras and printing techniques throughout the 

nineteenth century – portable cameras, faster exposures, cheaper and more durable prints – 

released the professional and the amateur from being tied to the studio or having the burden of 

moving a cartload of bulky equipment when they worked out of doors. The publication of 

Eadweard Muybridge’s scientific study Animal locomotion in 1887 – showing a succession of 

split-second photographs of animals and naked human figures in movement – demonstrated how 

a camera was able to capture changes in muscular configuration and reveal new truths about the 

human body. This in turn stimulated a fresh look at the body’s outward form and its potential for 

idealization. Muybridge’s studies were available in multi-volume form, as were other similar 

studies of human motion by Étienne-Jules Marey and Thomas Eakins. Many of the Muybridge’s 

most successful artist-contemporaries owned a set of his Animal locomotion, such as Rodin, 

Gerôme, Bouguereau, Puvis de Chavannes, Whistler, Leighton and Sargent. 

Photographing the male nude as an aide for artists had invited parallels with Classical (nude) 

statuary, and this in turn led in the late nineteenth century to a cult of body-building to achieve a 

perfect male physique that could mirror the statuary of old. Photographic collections of classical 

poses, with male nudes occasionally seen as ‘supporting’ architectural motifs, were assembled by 

Koch & Rieth, whose Der Akt appeared in 1894, and Émile Bayard, who completed his portfolio 

Le Nu esthétique in 1903. Perhaps the most famous of these statuesque posing body-builders 

was the Hungarian-born Briton, Eugen Sandow (1867–1925), hailed at that time as ‘the world’s 

most perfect man!’ Sandow published his own Journal, exhibiting photographs of his ‘movements’ 

and ‘poses’, and promoting his own body-building equipment and diet. 1 His book Life is 

movement, published in Britain in 1918, was sold worldwide, exploiting the vogue for wrestling 

and other athletic poses which had been building over the twenty years since the revival of the 

Olympic Games in 1896. Sandow also recommended that ‘every physical culturist should own a 

camera … the two hobbies form an admirable combination’. 

In the second half of the nineteenth century some saw photography as destined to attain the same 

status as painting, though others firmly rejected this notion. After the cataclysm of WWI which 

affected so many levels of human behaviour, creativity and understanding – and which we might 

29

say, with hindsight, was adumbrated in the arts by movements such as Cubism, Expressionism, 

atonality in music and ‘parole in libertà’ in poetry – new definitions of the purposes and uses of 

photography were to be expected. The 1920s saw photography branching out into the fields of 

propaganda and social and political agitation, as well as into new artistic experiments with the 

camera, as an aid to scientific investigations, and as the ideal tool to feed the increasing popular 

appeal of fashion photography. Amongst artists, photography was also taken up by the 

Surrealists for the purpose of provocative anti-rationalism, and by others for the expression of 

greater frankness about sexual matters. 

During the years of the threat of criminal prosecution under the Labouchère amendment in 

Britain, magazines and photographs of the male nude found a place in assuaging some of the 

emotional needs and desires of the homosexual fraternity, and in fact naked male and female 

‘artists’ photography models’ were openly advertised as available from, for example, an ‘Art Service’ 

in Liverpool during the interwar years. 2 Germany had led the way with magazines serving the 

gay interest, such as Adolph Brand’s Der Eigene (1896–1932) and Otto Bierbaum’s remarkable 

but short-lived Der Insel (1899-1901). The Swiss Karl Meier, who first wrote occasionally for 

Brand’s magazine in the 1920’s under the pseudonym ‘Rolf’, had returned to Zurich by 1934, 

and continued to write for the gay publications Schweizerisches Freundschaftsbanner (1933- 

1936) and Menschenrecht (1937-1942), after which he appears to have taken charge of the 

latter magazine, publishing it under the title Der Kreis from 1943 onwards. These would be the 

only German-language gay magazines to continue publishing during the Nazi period, though of 

course not in Germany itself. One should not overlook the circulation, too, of previously 

commercially available photographs of naked models described below, albeit clandestinely. 

Several earlier cultural and social developments had also contributed to the possibilities for gay 

men expressing their sexuality in the 1930s, from which Vaughan and other closeted 

homosexuals may have benefited. 

In spite of Germany’s criminalization of homosexuality in 1871 3 there were active underground 

circles which became fairly open in the big cities during the Weimar Republic, especially in Berlin, 

whose notorious permissiveness up to 1933 was enjoyed by men like Auden, Isherwood, Spender 

and Bacon. Similarly, the openness of Parisian artistic circles to diversity from distinct coteries 

around the personalities of, for example, Diaghilev, Picasso, Cocteau and Josephine Baker and, 

by contrast, the Gleichschaltung of Austrian society to Nazi homophobic ideology cannot have 

passed unnoticed by Vaughan on his visits to Germany, Austria and France in the 1930s. Even 

in the midst of the war, he would inscribe some of his drawings with quotations from German 

poetry, which might have risked drawing his fellow soldiers’ attention to his particular sensibility. 

In Germany there had been a recognized tradition of male bonding in the nineteenth century 

through the politicized nationalist Burschenschaften and, in a different setting towards the end of 

that century, through a revived Wandervogel movement – a version of ‘back to [exploring and 

enjoying] nature’, as an escape from the effects of rapid and widespread industrialization across 

Germany’s cities. This would give impetus both to the ‘naturist’ movement and to the exaltation 

of nudity and, through magazines and photography, to a cult of the naked body, to body-building 

and athleticism, and to mass displays of gymnastics. 

It would be the pioneering German magazine Der Eigene, mentioned above, that first gave wider 

circulation to the new style of ‘aesthetic’ nude photographs of languid pubescent Italian youths 

30

Two male figures posing at tug of war [P44] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Male figure standing beside rowing boat [P46] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Len with a second male on beach [P45] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

A male figure walking down the beach [P47] 

printed on postcard paper (inverted), with ink marking 

8.7 x 13.8 cm 

31

y Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856–1931), a German aristocrat who had settled in Taormina 

on the island of Sicily before the turn of the century. His photographs, along with those of his 

compatriot Wilhelm, aka. Guglielmo, Plüschow (1852–1930), were also issued as postcard 

collections, and are known to have been widely distributed across Europe and beyond, as were 

photographs of similar subjects by the Italians Vincenzo Galdi and Gaetano d’Agata. At the same 

time some photographic studios would strip away Italianate languidness to develop the culture 

of the naked (male) ‘pose’ also known as the ‘pose plastique’, depicting naked young men 

entangled in a group which often resembled a fragment of a sarcophagus or temple frieze from 

ancient Greece. Much later, an Englishman called Laurence Woodford, who garnered the title of 

‘The Prince of Pose’, would in 1938 publish his book Physical Idealism and the Art of Pose. His 

models – wearing the minimal ‘posing pouch’ such as used by some of Vaughan’s photographic 

subjects – would also appear in well-established and ‘respectable’ body-building or naturist 

magazines such as Health and Strength and Health and Fitness. Besides his own photography 

of his friends at his studio and at Pagham, Vaughan is known to have had collections of similar 

photos by others, and of magazines such as the above. 

In Germany Vaughan might have come across the movements or publications of Adolf Koch or 

Major Hans Surén. Surén had been the German Army’s Director of Physical Education for four 

years before his dismissal in 1924, whereupon he published his illustrated book Der Mensch und 

die Sonne followed a year later by his manual for disciplined exercises Deutsche Gymnastik to 

promote ‘virile, primitive manhood’. Koch, on the other hand, coming from a Socialist perspective, 

advocated naked gymnastics in the open air, with the educational purpose of alleviating the 

effects of urban poverty that damaged the health of children and young people. Koch would 

eventually organize a widely attended international Congress on Nudity and Education in 1929, 

but his work would be banned when the Hitler regime came to power. Whether this was because 

of his known Socialist politics, or because he promoted naked school exercises, is unclear. 

Illustration from Hans Suren’s 

Deutsche Gymnastik 

This encouragement of increased physical activity in the open air was matched by a new fashion 

for swimming and sunbathing naked. This had already started, for example, at Stockholm’s 

swimming baths before World War I. Shortly after the war, Coco Chanel, a leading figure of 

fashion, hymned the beauty of bronzed bodies and encouraged sunbathing at fashionable 

resorts in the south of France. France saw the launch in 1926 of Marcel Kienné de Mongeot’s 

fortnightly naturist magazine Vivre intégralement from within the League for Physical and Mental 

Regeneration. In the same year, the American naturist Bernarr Macfadden launched the shortlived 

Muscle Builder, followed by his more successful magazine Physical Culture in 1929. 

Cooper points out that a difference would soon become evident between ‘naturists’ with their 

more philosophical and contemplative enjoyment of being naked in a natural setting in the spirit 

of de Mongeot, and ‘nudists’ who admired the sensuality of the naked body for its own sake and 

delighted in seeing it or being themselves seen naked in the spirit of Macfadden. Publishing of 

these magazines and their photographs, however, still risked prosecution. 4 

In the 1920s the genre of a photographic essay or ‘oeuvre’ – in place of the ‘livre d’artiste’, a ‘livre 

de photographie’ so to speak – broke new ground with the publication of the likes of Germaine 

Krull’s Métal (1928, exploring the engineering structures of the Eiffel Tower and other impressive 

metal structures), Man Ray’s Electricité (1931, showcasing his own invention, the ‘rayogramme’) 

and Brassaï’s Paris de nuit (1933, revealing an unglamorous and ignored side of Parisian life). 

Such publications may have inspired Vaughan to assemble his own photographic ‘livres’ – the 

Male model posing with 

hessian sheet [PL9] 

photographic print on Agfa Brovira 

paper laid on card 

30.2 x 20.2 cm (photograph), 

30.2 x 25.2 cm (card) 

32

33

Two male figures in silhouette, one draped in wet cloth [P48] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

A male figure in silhouette half covered in wet cloth [P51] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Pagham Pieta II [P34] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Male figure crouching at water’s edge [P52] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

34

‘Highgate Ponds’ album and, later, his memorial album for his fallen brother, ‘Dick’s Book of 

Photographs’. That first postwar decade had also seen the publication of several influential books 

on photography such as Moholy-Nagy’s Malerei, Photographie, Film (1925, no.8 of the series of 

Bauhaus Books), Albert Renger-Patzsch’s Die Welt ist schön (1928) and Franz Roh’s Foto-Auge: 

76 Fotos der Zeit (1929) and El Lissitzsky’s Russland: Die Rekonstruktion der Architektur in der 

Sowjetunion (1930), all of which were available in Britain. David Mellor has also drawn attention 

to the German lawyer turned photographer Erich Salomon, who was hailed – possibly questionably 

– as ‘the world’s first candid cameraman’ when he exhibited at the Royal Photographic Society in 

1935. 5 

It is known that Vaughan admired and owned photographs, amongst others by Man Ray and Bill 

Brandt, both of whose work appeared fairly regularly in the leading French cultural publication 

AMG (Arts et Métiers Graphiques). This was a fortnightly spiral-bound publication which ran from 

1927 to 1939, covering contemporary art, photography, literature and graphic design, and which 

proclaimed itself ‘le premier journal moderne d’information par l’image en France’, and was hailed 

as ‘une véritable encyclopédie des AMG de l’entre-deux guerres’. AMG also featured the latest 

contemporary typography and designs for advertising, so it would not have been out of place in 

an advertising agency. However, it is not known whether Vaughan saw in Lintas’s office, or 

privately, examples of this magazine which also featured, amongst others, work by leading 

professional, and known-to-be-gay, photographers such as the Hungarian Emeric Féher, the 

Balt George Hoyningen-Huene, the American George Platt Lynes, the Germans Herbert List 

and Horst P. Horst, and the Frenchmen Albert Rudomine, Jean Morel and Max Dupain, all of 

whom at one time in the 1930s photographed the male nude. 6 

It is noticeable that in its published form, Vaughan’s Journal does not recall any significant 

events of that decade other than a reminiscence of the summer of 1939 ‘before the Soviets had 

signed our death warrant’. 7 Colleagues at Lintas had remarked on his lack of interest in politics, 

right: 

Herbert List 

Ritti with fishing rod, 1937 

© Herbert List/Magnum Photo’s 

far right: 

Anonymous portrait of Serge Lifar, undated 

35

Male figure beside harbour wall (cut down) [P29] 


7.5 x 5 cm 

Two male figures one throwing [P31] 


7 x 5 cm 

Male bather pulling on anchor chain [P36] 


13.8 x 8.7 cm 

36

Two naked men facing each other on beach II [P53] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Male figure in bathing shorts lying on towel [P55] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Portrait of Percy Farrant [P54] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Male figure hanging off wooden dock joist [P56] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

37

although they were all living through what was certainly a tumultuous decade, beginning with a 

world-wide economic depression, the cause of steep rises in unemployment and poverty and 

consequent political agitation in many countries. In international politics the gradual 

emasculation of the power, prestige and influence of the League of Nations was seen in its 

repeated failure to prevent or mitigate the aggression of the rising Fascist powers, by Japan in 

Manchuria and China, Italy in Abysinnia, Germany in re-occupying the Rheinland, then marching 

into Austria, the Sudetenland and, finally, into all of Czech Bohemia and Moravia, and – what 

perhaps aroused the artistic community to its most vehement protest – the failure of democratic 

powers to take any meaningful action against Fascist and Nazi intervention in the three yearlong 

Spanish Civil War whose outbreak had coincided, ironically, with the Nazis’ showcase 

Olympic Games in Berlin. 

With one exception (for Schwitters’ collages) absent, too, are any reminiscences in Vaughan’s 

Journal of significant exhibitions of contemporary art in that decade that he might have seen, 

and to which, with hindsight, art historians tend to attribute undue impact. Among the many art 

galleries in London during the interwar years, historians often single out the likes of the 

Leicester, Mayor, London, Reid & Lefèvre, Zwemmer and New Burlington galleries, but in terms 

of impact, perhaps only the scandal aroused by the International Surrealist Exhibition at this last 

in 1936 might have made an impression with the broader public. Nor does Vaughan make any 

mention in his Journal of the ‘rising stars’ of British modernism such as Moore, Nicholson, 

Hepworth, Piper and painters of the more engagé Euston Road School - or even to Sutherland, 

whose sensibility and style Vaughan is known to have admired. 

Nor are the emerging new theories and interpretations that accompanied the developments in 

photography during those interwar mentioned in Vaughan’s journal. Only a vague recollection by 

his colleagues attests to his interest in foreign films – and by extension, presumably photography 

too – from France, Russia and Germany. In the service of propaganda for the new state, Russian 

artists turned photographers such as El Lissitzky and Rodchenko had incorporated innovative 

typography, abstract geometry, disorientating viewpoints and collage techniques. In Germany 

two complementary strains ran in parallel: on the one hand the documentary, unsentimental style 

of ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ – in photography, termed ‘Neue Optik’ - and seen for example in August 

Sanders’ ambition to document the German nation in hundreds of portrait studies; and, on the 

other, experimentation with photographic techniques, such as in Christian Schad’s 

‘schadographies’, Moholy-Nagy’s ‘photograms’ and the photocollaged work of Herbert Bayer. 

We cannot now know with certainty which photographic exhibitions Vaughan visited, or which 

publications he read. Given his interest in photography, he is unlikely to have overlooked The 

Studio magazine’s photographic annual entitled ‘Modern Photography’ launched in 1931, which 

ran until 1943. Each annual’s section of more than 60 photographs was prefaced by one essay 

on aesthetic and stylistic developments in photography, and another on technical developments 

in cameras, shooting film, darkroom printing, and so on. Quaintly for us today, every detail of the 

camera, lens aperture and shutter speed, and paper used, were listed in the index for almost all 

the images. Colour photography also began to appear in the 1936–37 annual. 

From the very first, the focus of the ‘Modern Photography’ annual was international; 

contemporary French, German, Hungarian and Japanese photographers dominated, with some 

British and American, but only one or two unremarkable Soviet Russians. Experimental 

Dick with drape [PL5] 


30.2 x 25 cm 

38

39

Boy fishing with a net [PL8] 

photographic print on Agfa Brovira paper laid on card 

24 x 29 cm 

40

House captain, portrait of John Cecil Wilmot Buxton [PL13] 


25 x 30.2 cm 

41

Studio portrait (left side) of model with drawing in background [PL14] 


25 x 30.2 cm 

42

photography was not overlooked: on the one hand, examples of negative and solarized prints, 

collage and photograms were included and discussed in the essays; on the other, fashion and 

advertising photography was admitted. Besides having their work reproduced in this annual, 

photographers such as Brandt, Man Ray and the Bauhauslers Bayer and Moholy-Nagy would 

also hold exhibitions in London during that decade. However, it was the contrasting fields of 

photojournalism and fashion photography that probably achieved the greatest impact in this 

period. The work of photojournalists such as Bert Hardy and fashion photographers such as 

Cecil Beaton (as well as several of the other known-to-be-gay photographers mentioned above) 

found greater resonance and public recognition during that decade. 

David Mellor has written that ‘in 1927 photography had been primarily a matter of studio practice, 

of artifice and contrivance in the interest of an ideal, usually of a portrait ideal’. 7 Indeed, the 

arrival of the miniature camera, Mellor suggests, ‘was the necessary technical precondition for 

the enormous growth in the use of this informal picture type of the 1930s’. Bert Hardy had 

confessed ‘when I started off with a Leica (in 1928), it changed my life completely. It started me 

as a photographer properly.’ 8 For the enthusiastic amateur photographer such as Vaughan, the 

annual ‘Modern Photography’ could offer a stimulating survey of contemporary international work, 

as well as technical advice and encouragement. The 1933–34 annual’s essay on technical 

progress endorsed Vaughan’s decision to purchase a Leica. It claimed that the arrival of the 

Leica III model ‘had established Leica photography as one of the outstanding technical 

developments in modern photography’. And for the newcomer joining Lintas as a trainee layout 

artist in 1931, that year’s annual had fortuitously advertised ‘A.Tolmer’s ‘Mise en Page’ (‘a super 

textbook of advertising’) for ‘the Theory and Practice of Layout’, to be published in the autumn. 

And would Vaughan have missed the Royal Photographic Society’s ‘Exhibition of Modern 

Photographs’ in 1932, or its ‘The Modern Spirit in Photography and Advertising’ in 1934, 

exhibitions which included work by many of the same names as featured in the ‘Modern 

Photography’ annuals? 

In the collection of Vaughan’s photographs presented here, we see echoes of Russian montage 

or collage, of Surrealist spatial and perspectival contradictions, of German sports culture and 

sun-worship photography, and of Cartier-Bresson’s ‘ decisive moment’ permeating Vaughan’s 

more conventional compositional cropping and snapshot improvisations. These themes and 

techniques were explored in Vaughan’s two ‘livres de photographie’, the above-mentioned 

‘Highgate Ponds’ and his memorial to his fighter-pilot younger brother who had been shot down 

in 1940, ‘ Dick’s book of photographs’. The former focused on lightly clad or naked men at ease, 

posing or sunbathing in the heat of summer, the photographs in the album interspersed with 

hand-drawn inscriptions indicating the rising heat at the Ponds. The latter ‘livre’ illustrated the 

greater range of subjects that Vaughan tackled with his camera beyond the Pagham 

photographs, such as landscapes, men at work, dancers, studio portraits, and still lives. 

Can one speak of particular characteristics in Vaughan’s photographs? What is evident is that 

Vaughan, the sensitive enthusiast, was experimenting with different genres, discovering the 

close-up, the informal ‘decisive moment’ shot, the action shot, the panoramic landscape, an 

occasional still life, as well as live photography of the ballet in performance. It is probable that he 

had instructive exchanges of ideas with more experienced colleagues at Lintas who might have 

seen some, even if not all of his early efforts with his first camera. It is difficult to imagine that he 

did not find some inspiration from exhibitions and publications such as those mentioned above. 

43

Male figure on hands and knees [P57] 

printed on postcard paper (inverted), inscribed ‘Mud’ in ink verso 

8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Wreck of fishing boat on beach [P60] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Male figure in bathing shorts lying on beach [P58] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Friends of the artist sitting on Pagham beach [P70] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

44

Dick Vaughan in the distance standing beside boat [P61] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Two beached boats and sluice [P62] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

Portrait of female friend on Pagham beach [P71] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

The Quickstep [P64] 


8.7 x 13.8 cm 

45

46

At times Vaughan gives a clue as to how he sees and feels through the camera. He can be the 

voyeur and intruder, but he doesn’t belong among the sitters or those standing around at 

Highgate Ponds. Nevertheless his wandering and taking shots is tolerated. He is a ‘spy’ 

capturing moments that others – his subjects – are unaware of or even might not dream of 

seeing preserved for posterity. Prunella Clough reminisced to Gerard Hastings: ‘Keith used the 

camera almost as a justification to look – really look – at the male nude. Staring at an unclothed 

person, outside the life class, is an intrusive activity and makes people uncomfortable … when 

Keith had a camera fixed to his eye, it legitimized his gazing at another unclothed human being.’ 9 

With one exception [PC5] Four figures on a beach, Vaughan’s collages [PC1-7, ILL. P.21-27], are inspired 

by the setting of the mostly empty beach, where sand and undefined blue sky or water blend 

without boundaries or horizons. The idea of the empty foreground expanse with scattered 

‘incidents’ may owe something to contemporary Surrealism, in the work of Salvador Dalí, Yves 

Tanguy, or perhaps Henry Moore’s 1930’s studies for sculpture. However, the introduction of a 

cut-out photograph of a figure suggests a homage to, or tryout for, other sources of inspiration: 

von Gloeden’s Figure on a pedestal with [PC4] Male figure seated on wooden breakwater, the 

angled propaganda image of sunny New Soviet Man for [PC2] Smiling man with hands on head, 

and Herbert Bayer’s Figure on a beach for [PC3] Figure lying on beach at night. In contrast, the 

floating figures in [PC1] Two male figures on a beach are of a different order, and seem to 

presage an encounter or exchange, with a frisson of sexual tension in a misty, unboundaried 

ether. The occasional sketched-in boats may refer to sights at Pagham, without yet situating the 

setting with precision. Such outlines of boats would occasionally reappear in his later drawings 

with figures. By contrast, the metal buoy [PC5 VERSO] is a classic Surrealist objet trouvé: a banal, 

inert, accidental find that is transformed by its foregrounding into a menacing living form 

threatening to explode out of the frame. 

The 1920s saw a new daring with close-up portraiture that asked for the sitter to submit to the 

intimacy of very close observation. This intimacy might capture an angle, a mood, or an expression 

without needing to portray the full compass of the head. The technical capabilities of the camera 

lens made these close-ups possible. Vaughan must have thought that the full-size black-andwhite 

prints (measuring roughly 30 x 25 cm) in this exhibition worth producing, possibly to show 

or give to his sitters, or indeed for himself to learn from or enjoy. With the exception of the couple 

of rock studies and beach scenes, all are portrait or figure studies, in the studio or outdoors, 

ranging from youths to young men, with only one formal, beaming, bespectacled mature figure, 

resembling a study for a worthy’s head-and-shoulders memorial sculpture. Noteworthy are the 

two solarized studies of his brother Dick [PL1], [PL5], which appear posed rather than spontaneous. 

In the same vein, Vaughan chose to pose a model as Michelangelo’s David [PL2], another as the 

Apollo Belvedere (with hessian sheet!) [PL9], and to lay out the Man with oil drum [PL3], in imitation 

of an artistically enticing female nude in the most flattering flagrancy. 

Bather throwing ball [PL11] 

photographic print laid on Agfa Brovira 

paper, inscribed ‘5/-’ in ink verso 

30.2 x 25. cm 

In the Pagham photographs Vaughan also adopts the role of the nostalgic pictorialist. A young 

man is captured in the distance, amidst the picturesque decay of the boatyard. Vaughan 

described the evocative setting of ‘the hulks of boats with their tarred backs and the sun 

bleaching and rotting the paintwork, rearing their mass against the china sky’ 10 where he 

spotted Stan’s younger brother Len ‘moving slowly, rather disinterestedly, the mud over his 

ankles and the large black flanks of timber dwarfing him’. 11 This group of boatyard photographs 

are an exception among the others taken at Pagham. The greatest number record the ‘pagan’ 

47

pleasures of sun-worship, uninhibited nudity, and young men at rest or play on the isolated 

beach. In this Vaughan appears as the vicarious (homosexual) hedonist: achieving pleasure and 

release by exploring and capturing the lithe naked bodies through his viewfinder. 

Peter Adam explained to Gerard Hastings: ‘Photography allowed Keith to evolve a close and 

intimate relationship with the model’s body in such a way that he, being a somewhat diffident 

and reserved character, would have found difficult to do otherwise. Taking a photograph for 

Keith was a way of ‘making love’ to the bodies he admired’. 12 Indeed it had been at Highgate 

Ponds in the early 1930s that Vaughan first saw Stan doing handstands, and he would 

eventually take Stan and his brother Len to Pagham, while Harold Colebrook brought his friends 

Max and Chris, all of whom appear in the photographs. Of Stan at Pagham, Vaughan wrote: ‘A 

silent, objectively physical relationship grew between us … the greater part of the time I saw him 

he was naked: the real point of contact was between his body and my eyes. Detached and 

dispassionate.’ 13 And of Len, Vaughan would later reminisce: ‘I could only touch his body 

through the lens of my camera … he liked to know the importance of his body and sunbathed 

for this reason … Len stripped and moved about with his copper-varnished limbs, I followed with 

my camera obsessed with the colour and the intangible beauty of the scene.’ 14 

At this stage of indecision about his future direction, Vaughan’s photographic sensibility seems 

at best mildly experimental, with reflections of Surrealism, albeit tempered by a certain British 

reserve. Nothing is outright shocking. There are no photographs of repellent decomposition à la 

Dalí or Buñuel, no aggressive photo-propaganda à la John Heartfield, no startling disparities à la 

Dora Maar. In the ‘Highgate Ponds’ album, however, he does toy with contradictions of spatial 

location, of perspectival positioning, and use unnatural repetition frozen in a framework of 

geometry. With one exception – that of solarization – there is no technical wizardry à la Moholy- 

Nagy, artifice à la Beaton, or distortion and darkroom manipulation à la Brandt. In the interwar 

period readings about class and status were still visible and topical in portraiture as a genre, as 

seen for example in the contrasts between the high society subjects of Beaton and the workingclass 

subjects of Brandt. Vaughan, by contrast, uses the naked figure as his central subject in 

settings almost entirely devoid of specific details, so that such readings are not to be found in 

this collection of his photographs. 

In his Journal, reminiscing on the previous summer in the bleak January of 1940, Vaughan 

wrote: ‘It is difficult to recall those days of last summer; difficult to believe that they ever existed, 

waking each morning with the sun already hot and high in the sky. Walking out through the 

shallows of the sinking tide and wandering all day over the islands of shingles with nothing but 

the white flecks of birds and our naked bodies browning in the sun and salt. … Impossible to 

believe that war was anything more than a figment in the imagination of politicians. Yet it must 

have been some premonition that made me spend so much of each day with my eye screwed to 

the view-finder of a Leica in a desperate effort to preserve something one was afraid was 

vanishing forever.’ 15 At last, after the six years’ intermission of war mostly spent serving in the 

Pioneer Corps in Britain, Vaughan ‘reawoke’ on VE day and recorded one of the lengthiest and 

most poetic entries on a single day in his Journal : ‘Today I went to the river and the sun. … I sat 

under the shelter of the small earth cliff and took off my clothes. There was no-one about and 

the sun was a steady stream of heat. … I lay back and stretched myself into the brilliant warmth. 

Years have passed since I last did this. Perhaps I am the last person in Europe who can still lie in 

the sun. … A deep sensual contentment descended over me … ’ 16 

48

NOTES 

1 Emmanuel Cooper, Fully exposed: the male nude in photography, London 1990, p. 92. 

2 As seen in the October 1927 issue of ‘Drawing & Design’, from the publishers of ‘The Studio’, ‘Commercial Art’ and 

other ‘Special Publications dealing with many phases of Art’ [sic]. 

3 The infamous ‘Paragraph 175’ of the Reich’s Criminal Code, the repeal of which, although voted for in 1929, was 

never implemented until it was ‘eased’ in 1969. 

4 Cooper, ibid., pp.73–74. 

5 David Mellor, in The Real Thing, London 1975, p. 27. 

6 Photography was regularly featured in AMG, but the issues of March 1930, August 1931 and August 1932 had 

specially dedicated sections. An online database for all the AMG issues has been assembled at RIT (The Rochester 

Institute of Technology, USA: Rochester also being the original home of Eastman Kodak). 

7 Mellor, op.cit., p. 25 

8 Mellor, ibid., p. 25. 

9 Gerard Hastings, Keith Vaughan: the photographs, Pagham Press 2013, p. 13. 

10 Colin Cruise, Keith Vaughan, Figure and Ground, Bristol 2013, p. 23. 

11 Cruise, ibid., p. 23. 

12 Hastings, op. cit., p. 14. 

13 Quoted by Hastings, ibid., p. 6, from Vaughan’s unpublished ‘Memoire’, February 1965. 

14 Hastings, ibid., p. 74. 

15 Vaughan, Journal & drawings, edited and published by Alan Ross, 1966, p. 14. 

16 Vaughan, ibid., p.103. 

Studio portrait IV [PL17 VERSO] 

photographic print laid on card 

20 x 16.6 cm (image); 30.2 x 25.5 cm (card) 

49

50

Sources and further reading 

Arts et Métiers Graphiques, Photographie, Paris 1930 (reprinted by Paul Attinger, Neuchatel 

1980) 

Pierre Borhan, Men for Men: homoeroticism and male homosexuality in the history of photography 

since 1840, London 2007 

Cristian Bouqueret, Des années folles aux années noires: la nouvelle vision photographique en 

France 1920–1940, Paris 1997 

Emmanuel Cooper, Fully exposed: the male nude in photography, London 1995 

Colin Cruise (ed.), Keith Vaughan, Figure and ground: drawings, prints and photographs, 

Bristol 2013 

William A. Ewing, The Body: photoworks of the human form, London 1994 

James Gardiner, Who’s a pretty boy then? 150 years of gay life in pictures, London 1996 

Gerard Hastings, Keith Vaughan: the photographs, Pagham Press, 2013 

Gerard Hastings, Awkward artefacts: the ‘erotic fantasies’ of Keith Vaughan, Pagham Press, 2017 

Tobias Natter and Elisabeth Leopold, Nude Men: from 1800 to the present day, Leopold Museum 

Vienna, 2012 

Max Scheler and Matthias Harder, Herbert List: the monograph, Munich 2000 

Len Sharpe, The Lintas Story: impressions and recollections, London 1964 

Philip Vann and Gerard Hastings, Keith Vaughan, London 2012 

Keith Vaughan, Journal & drawings, edited and published by Alan Ross, 1966 

Bruce Weber and James Crump, George Platt Lynes: photographs from the Kinsey Institute, 

Boston Mass., 1993 

Malcolm Yorke, Keith Vaughan: his life and work, London, 1990 

The Real Thing: an anthology of British Photography 1840–1950, Arts Council of Great Britain, 

1975 

Thirties: British art and design before the war, Arts Council of Great Britain and Victoria & Albert 

Museum, 1979–80 

Ashley Havinden: advertising and the artist, National Galleries of Scotland 2003 

Deckchair [PL4] 


30.2 x 25 cm (card) 

51

Tracey ‘Bunnie’ Stamp, pictured centre, 1952 

Austin/Desmond Fine Art would like to acknowledge the following for help and assistance 

rendered in the production of this exhibition and catalogue: 

The Stamp Family and the late Tracey 'Bunnie' Stamp 

Mr Philip Wright 

Mr Colin Mills 

Mr Fred Mann 

Lorraine Finch ACR at LF Conservation and Preservation 

Kim Driscoll at Archer Architects 

Catalogue design by Peter Gladwin at Artquarters Press 

Printing by Artquarters Press 

Envision and curation by David Archer 

ISBN 978-1-872926-38-4 

Front cover: 

Boy in fishing net (detail) [P3] 

Back cover: 

The original hand-painted cardboard box which contained the postcard sized Pagham Beach photographs 

52

Austin / Desmond Fine Art

Vaughan_book

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?