Vaughan_book

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]
printed on postcard paper
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