Cecil Beaton at Imperial War Museum North. Shipyard Chic.

Neil McQuillian discovers what happened when Cecil Beaton – high society photographer and fashionista – was commissioned in 1943 to document the distinctly unglamorous Tyneside shipyards.

The portfolio of Cecil Beaton (1904-80), arguably the greatest portrait photographer of the twentieth century, is a celebration of beauty, style and celebrity itself. Ranging from movie stars through musicians, fashion icons and royalty, Beaton was a connoisseur of the great and the good. The great unwashed, less so. One wonders, then, what Beaton made of being sent to Tyneside by the Ministry of Information during WW2 to document the burgeoning productivity of the shipyards. This was a man, after all, who found aesthetic fault with both Audrey Hepburn’s neck and the Queen’s nose. Tyneside Shipyards, 1943: Photographs by Cecil Beaton is a new outdoor display at Imperial War Museum North that presents six of the images taken on this assignment in five metre-high, warts-and-all glory.

According to exhibitions manager Laura Whalley, the display is intended to create an ‘outside presence’ for the museum that will inspire reflection on the role of the sea during wartime, ahead of the forthcoming special exhibition All Aboard: Stories of War at Sea. This is the third time that the huge outdoor frames have been used, following Alastair Thain’s Marines and another show produced in conjunction with the Mines Advisory Group, Surviving the Peace: Photographs by Sean Sutton. With Don McCullin’s Shaped By War recently ended, this rich sequence of photographic content will continue in September when the museum marks the twentieth anniversary of the First Gulf War by exhibiting a small selection of John Keane’s images from the conflict.

Sited on The Quays, a sprawling development of modern buildings puffing out their glass and steel chests, Imperial War Museum North had some work to do to impose itself on its surroundings. But Daniel Libeskind’s bold design is truly an ‘alpha’ building, and achieving an ‘outside presence’ alongside it is no easy task. Nevertheless, the six images mounted on three two-sided frames hold their own, managing to evoke the dirt and the clanging of the old shipyards in spite of the polished post-industrial setting. Beaton’s past as a fashion photographer is discernible in the marked attention to the subjects’ clothing in the four portrait shots: padding spills from a young lad’s ripped jacket, a female welder’s dress is moth-eaten yet smart.

It is for his other work, of course, that Beaton is best known: the creator of some of the twentieth century’s iconic images of celebrity glamour. There is, nonetheless, something ‘fair is foul, foul is fair’ about Beaton: he occasionally posed subjects in ways that undermined the very illusion of glamour that so much of his career worked towards promoting and finessing.

Perhaps, then, he did not wander the shipyards holding a hanky over his nose. When the Walker Art Gallery held a Beaton retrospective last year, curator Jessica Feather spoke of the artist’s capacity to create portraits that provided ‘deep insights into the extraordinary people who came before his camera’. From this perspective, the shipyard portraits are an opportunity to see what happened when Beaton was faced with ‘ordinary’ people.

Arguably, though, there was no such thing as ordinariness in 1943. The unique circumstances of WW2 meant that people such as these workers were recognised and valued for their contribution to the war effort, and how ironic that it should be Cecil Beaton who went to validate them, to render them extraordinary.

Tyneside Shipyards, 1943: Photographs by Cecil Beaton, Until July 2011, Open 7 days a week from 10am – 6pm (Nov to Feb 10am  – 5pm). Free. Neil McQuillian writes on food, travel and culture. His short story Old Man In A Tracky appeared in Comma Press’ Brace: A New Generation in Short Fiction. Images: both courtesy Neil McQuillian.

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