Half a Century of The Sunday Times Magazine in Pictures

Anastasia Grabova takes a look at a new exhibition marking 50 years of The Sunday Times Magazine, at the Saatchi Gallery [caption id="attachment_1464" align="aligncenter" width="478" caption="1993 Kylie Minogue by Uli Weber"][/caption]   They say a picture is worth a thousand words. At the Saatchi Gallery right now they are indicative of many more. 50 frames adorn the walls, one for every year that The Sunday Times Magazine has been published. Each carries one, two, or three images published in the magazine that year, starting with the girl who invented doe-eyed, the elfin Jean Shrimpton, and ending with two photos of wealthy big game trophy hunters by David Chancellor, shot this year. I am at an exhibition marking 50 years of the The Sunday Times Magazine, walking through half a decade of iconic photography. It was way back in in the very early 1960s when Jean “The Shrimp” Shrimpton was “the face of the moment”,  the Beatles launched their career at the now legendary Cavern Club, Liverpool, and D.H Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was finally found not guilty of obscenity. The ’60s were just getting into their famous swing. But newspapers were still very dull affairs indeed. Whilst the great glossy magazines of America, including Life and Look, told the tale of the USA and the world in brilliant colour photography, the papers back in Blighty still carried classifieds on the front page. The Sunday Times took the great leap in launching the first colour supplement to be included in any UK newspaper – The Sunday Times Magazine. [caption id="attachment_1463" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="1993 Boy George by Uli Weber"][/caption] It was considered to be so controversial a decision that even the owner of The Sunday Times at the time, Roy Thomson, declared “My God, this is going to be a disaster!” And many readers agreed: “American sales gimmick” said one in the market research conducted shortly after the magazine’s launch. “Husband objects strongly” said another. “Awful American influence” and “not interested” were just further examples of the verdict pronounced by existing readers. “It’s a bit like people saying ‘yuck, who needs a colour TV when we’ve got black and white,’” Sarah Baxter (the current editor of The Sunday Times Magazine) tells me as we walk around the exhibition. “But the fact is it drew a whole lot of new readers to the paper, increasing the circulation by 250,000. The advertisers poured in, and then of course every newspaper followed in our footsteps.” What seemed to some like an outlandish idea at the time, turned out to be just what the public was looking for. “People were becoming much more interested in the world around them,” Sarah explains. “A magazine could report as nowhere else the changing mood of the times. So, that’s where we came in, to fill a critical gap in a public that was thirsty for knowledge. [caption id="attachment_1462" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="27th April 1980 cover"][/caption] “We’ve been through hundreds of thousands of pictures to select those that captured the moment.” And as we look at a 1964 image by Lord Snowdon, titled Women MPs in the House, a familiar face is pointed out; Margaret Thatcher at the very tip of the pyramid. “Even then she knew that there was one place that she wanted to be.” There are several pictures that Sarah Baxter shows me on her tour around the exhibition, and many were familiar from a childhood of reading the magazine; “There was something about it that stayed with me.” Some of these capture a sometimes painful truth; an injured soldier being cared for by his mother, as well as Terry O’Neill’s portrait of Amy Winehouse (“so full of life”) just a couple of years before her death. Others are playful, if not decidedly mischievous, particularly Boy George as a devil in 1993, styled by Katherine Hamnett and Vivienne Westwood; “I just love it for its creativity. The idea of dousing him in red and making him look like the devil because he’s been so naughty. I just love it.” [caption id="attachment_1461" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="26th January 1964 cover"][/caption] When Sarah asks me about my personal favourite, I immediately name Terry O’Neill’s timeless portrait of Faye Dunaway, sat meditatively by the deserted swimming pool of Beverley Hills Hotel, newspapers strewn all around her, the Oscar she won the night before stood proudly on the breakfast table. “A lot of people love that picture because it is so intimate,” says Sarah. “Big stars are always so closed, and there she is, the morning after in her dressing gown. You can imagine she had a good party the night before.” Over the past 50 years, The Sunday Times Magazine has played witness to sometimes the most glamorous, and sometimes the most painful moments in the history of the world, but always the most significant. “There’s not much that has escaped our notice,” and when I ask what changes have been made in the lifetime of the publication, Sarah does admit that she brought in Ozzy Osbourne’s health column, and Alison Jackson’s Fake Take (“spoof pictures of famous people in funny situations”) because she “thought sometimes the magazine wasn’t funny enough,” but those core value that have made The Sunday Times Magazine so successful remain the same: “great writing, great photography.” The Sunday Times Magazine 50th Anniversary exhibition is on now until Sunday 19th February (closed 11th – 14th) at the Saatchi Gallery. Tomorrow’s edition of the Sunday Times Magazine is a special anniversary issue, featuring a pick of the best photos from the last half century and the 50 greatest front covers.  [caption id="attachment_1460" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="1st August 1965 cover"][/caption]