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“Remember, Parks, there is nothing more un-chic than a palm tree. Don’t let me see one in your pictures.” This advice, given in 1966 by Diana Vreeland, was roundly ignored by photographer Norman Parkinson, as was his custom.
By then, Parkinson, at the top of his game for 25 years, had been living with his wife and muse Wenda in the tranquillity of tropical Tobago in a house of their own design, built in 1963. Palm trees were inescapable and would feature, despite remonstrations from on high, in pictures taken on the island, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Tahiti, and the Seychelles, not least because he would use souvenir tourist postcards as prompts for locations. Many of them, alongside his striking royal portraits and Vogue covers, are published this month in a new collection. “He was a remarkable man, really, relentless in his pursuit of fresh, strong images,” recalled fashion editor Grace Coddington, his accomplice on many of these trips.
For Parkinson, by then in his 50s, Tobago offered up refuge from the hectic fashion merry-go-round. After a quarter-century of non-stop work and travel, he admitted to fatigue and a need to step away. “I want to do nothing but try to discover who I am,” he said, adding, “I would like to discover, if I can, who is the girl that I married because, you know, you can live with someone for 20 years and never have the time to get to know her.”
But trouble was brewing in paradise. A hurricane wreaked havoc on their Caribbean idyll and much of their home had to be rebuilt. Yet worse was to come. In 1987, on the eve of a retrospective exhibition in New York, Wenda died in her sleep in their London home. Four weeks to the day the Tobago house burned down. “I feel that my identity,” he wrote, “has been blown away in smoke…” said Parkinson. For the next three years, he took any work he could get to overcome the double tragedy. He made several return visits to England, to the Thames Valley where as a child he’d been evacuated. The intrusion of ring roads, motorways, and industrial estates made him melancholy about a corner of his homeland he had come to love from afar but had abandoned for so long. Parkinson died aged 76 in Singapore—still working, still on location, camera in hand.
Style: Photographs for Vogue by Norman Parkinson is out now