“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 American ’s 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 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 covers, are published this month in .
“He was a remarkable man, really, relentless in his pursuit of fresh, strong images,” recalled fashion editor , 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 wo.