Vaughan_book

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’
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