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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
Page 1: KEITH VAUGHAN ON PAGHAM BEACH, PHOT
Page 4 and 5: 2
Page 6 and 7: 4
Page 8 and 9: Vaughan’s mother had been educate
Page 10 and 11: Ballet rehearsal No.4 [BR4] printed
Page 12 and 13: Boy under beached ship hull [P5] pr
Page 14 and 15: Dick Vaughan [P13] printed on postc
Page 16 and 17: As an aside, it is interesting to n
Page 18 and 19: Male nude standing beside deckchair
Page 20 and 21: Man and oil drum [PL3] photographic
Page 22 and 23: A male figure draped full length in
Page 24 and 25: Smiling man with hands on head [PC2
Page 26 and 27: Male figure seated on wooden breakw
Page 28 and 29: Seated naked figure on beach [PC6]
Page 30 and 31: Len seated on beach beside deckchai
Page 32 and 33: say, with hindsight, was adumbrated
Page 34 and 35: y Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856-1
Page 36 and 37: Two male figures in silhouette, one
Page 38 and 39: Male figure beside harbour wall (cu
Page 40 and 41: although they were all living throu
Page 42 and 43: Boy fishing with a net [PL8] photog
Page 44 and 45: Studio portrait (left side) of mode
Page 46 and 47: Male figure on hands and knees [P57
Page 48 and 49: 46
Page 52 and 53: 50
Page 54: Tracey ‘Bunnie’ Stamp, pictured

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