Snowdon, Untitled

LAURA JACOBS

After half a century, Lord Snowdon still distrusts the camera, putting all his faith in his subjects. As the eminent English photographer becomes the subject of a major exhibition, at London s National Portrait Gallery, LAURA JACOBS contrasts the glamorous life of Tony Armstrong-Jones— the sexy rebel who married Princess Margaret in 1960—with the quiet, self-deprecating passion for his work

'I hate cameras, absolutely hate them," insists England's eminent photographer Lord Snowdon. "They always break down."

Sturdier than his equipment, Snowdon came of age in the 1950s as Tony Armstrong-Jones, the young buck on a motorbike who came down from Cambridge, only to shake up the staid pages of the British glossies. It was a generational shift, the first glimmerings of a cultural shimmy that would find its apotheosis in the 60s, that decade of gold lame. Indeed, the 1960 marriage of ArmstrongJones to Princess Margaret (Queen Elizabeth's younger sister) is rightly seen as a turning point in the cult status of photography: the lensman as sexy royal.

But if Armstrong-Jones acquired a lofty title, he declined to take up the pretensions. In fact, in his photography, self-effacement has been Snowdon's middle name. This is not an artist who, figuratively speaking, climbs into the picture. "What one's got to remember is that the photographer is totally unimportant. It's the subject that matters," he says. "A photograph shouldn't be strange. I think a viewer should say, 'I've seen so-and-so look like that a million times.'" To Snowdon, strange is easy—catching what's "typical" is the challenge, a challenge he's honestly met in subjects ranging from fashion and the arts to documentary studies of the sick and dispossessed.

Though Snowdon at 69 still suffers over "the agonizing moment you press that ghastly button," he maintains that photography is not an art. It is only now, 50 years and 21 books into his career, that he's having his first major exhibition: a retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery in London, accompanied by book number 22, the impressive Photographs by Snowdon: A Retrospective. Considering, however, that Snowdon, a Vanity Fair contributing photographer, has just returned from a shoot in Africa, the word "retrospective" seems premature.

"Exactly. I tried to take that word out of the title," he says. "But I love to work. I'm thrilled to wake up every morning for another day. And I'm slightly relieved, too, that I'm not dead. You know, that's nice."

"What ones got to remember is that the photographer is totally unimportant. It's the subject that matters," says Snowdon.