50 years of The Sunday Times Magazine

The Sunday Times Magazine became the Britain’s first colour newspaper supplement on its launch in February 1962.

Over the past fifty years, it has featured stunning images by some of the world’s finest photographers, including Don McCullin, David Bailey, Eve Arnold, Richard Avedon, Sam Taylor-Wood, Terry-O’Neill, Chris Floyd and Stuart Franklin.

The magazine is celebrating its 50th birthday with a special exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea.

As well as a string of sumptuously presented images are works from the magazine by renowned writers such as Ian Fleming, Martin Amis, Bruce Chatwin, Jilly Cooper, Zoe Heller, James Fox and Nicholas Tomalin.

Bright, white and dreamlike, each backlit photograph has a story to tell.  They move you to chuckle, frown, bewail and buckle. Some you’ll know well, others you won’t.  It is a splendid show. Here are some highlights.

Abbas / Magnum Photos. Trainee black police in Apartheid South Africa with Colonel SJ Malan. 1978.

In the 1970s, insights into Apartheid South Africa such as these were few. This photograph displays, purely through the art of perspective, just how un-sustainble the deranged Apartheid system was.

Nigel Parry / Creative Photographers Inc. Tony Blair before becoming leader of the Labour party. 1994.

Though you can’t see it very clearly here, on the actual image one can make out those infuriating little hairs along the cheekbone we always miss when shaving. Blair was already a dab hand at political imagery but tufts of Bambi show up in this imposing but intimate image.

Platon. World leaders at the UN General Assembly. 2010.

This is a great montage by renowned portrait photographer Platon, capturing perfectly each leader’s public persona. That of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad betrays a quirky, and slightly crackers, mischievousness I’ve always sensed in him.

Barry Lewis. Glastonbury. 2006.
Alain Buu / LightMediation. Mali: Sacred lake. 2006.

Many powerful photographs are intrinsically dark, in both emotion and palette. Barry Lewis’s nudist tableau from Glastonbury stands as effusively cheerful, the blue sky of an English summer set off against the cooler shades across the rest of the gallery. And the catfish catchers of Mali, in the lower photograph, are just part of a tremendous tale. Every year they strip a lake of its fish in under a quarter of an hour.

When The Sunday Times Magazine hit our weekend breakfast tables in 1962, the then-owner of the Sunday Times, Roy Thomson, believed it would be a disaster. His fears were, as this magnificent exhibition shows, rather misplaced.

The exhibition is held at the Saatchi Gallery, Duke of York’s Square, Chelsea from 31st January to 19th February (closed 11th-14th February). Opening hours: 10am to 6pm. Free entry.

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