Iconic photographer David Bailey admits he is ‘a whore’ when it comes to getting the most out of his subjects, writes Lesley Bellew, who chatted to him ahead of his latest exhibition

David Bailey still keeps in touch with the woman he photographed on his first, sizzling assignment for Vogue.

Jean Shrimpton ‘The Shrimp’ was 17 and he was a married man of 22 but the beautiful couple’s love affair catapulted them into the centre of London’s Swinging Sixties.

“I spoke to her the other day,” said Bailey, as everyone knows him.

“She’s all right. It’s funny, I still think of Jean and all my girls just as they were, not as little old grannies.”

Portraits of his ‘girls’ in the prime of their life, including the world’s first supermodel Shrimpton, will feature among 250 photographs he has chosen to exhibit in Bailey’s Stardust, at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from February 2014.

Bailey admits to falling in love with all of his sitters and says: “I am a whore. I fall in love with my subjects whether they are a man – I try to keep away from dogs – or a woman.

“They are at the centre of my universe for those few hours or a day.”

It was the sex and Bailey’s cheating ways that drove Shrimpton into the arms of actor Terence Stamp. Shrimpton later married Michael Cox and moved to Cornwall, leaving the modelling world behind her.

French actress Catherine Deneuve, New York model Penelope Tree and Hawaiian model Marie Helvin all fell under East End boy Bailey’s spell before he settled with English model Catherine Dyer. They have been married since 1986 and have three children.

“They [the children] keep me in touch with the world,” says Bailey, now 75.

Women played a major role in Bailey’s meteoric rise to fame but he considers his greatest influence came from two artists.

He said: “I was into Disney films and when I was about 12 I did a painting of Bambi. The horrible school I was at sent it in to the City & Guilds and I won a prize.

“Later, my friend Danny O’Connell got me into Picasso.”

“I owe everything to Mr Disney and Picasso for putting me on the right track. All that nonsense that I was influenced by cinema – all that French gear – I wasn’t really, I realised it looked like that because it was the cheapest way to make a film.”

Bailey’s new exhibition Stardust will also feature actors, writers, politicians, filmmakers, artists and people encountered on his travels.

Portraits of Kent’s Mick Jagger, model Kate Moss, actor Jack Nicholson and musician Damon Albarn plus a self-portrait taken during Bailey’s National Service in Singapore span more than five decades.

Bailey said: “Everyone has got a story and I have to find a story but I do not make judgements on people.

“I got along with Reggie Kray when I photographed the Kray twins and they slashed my dad and gave him 68 stitches when they were 19.

“I still keep a cold, journalistic way about me. You can’t be emotional about people. It is not my job to moralise.”

He may not moralise, but how does the UK’s most illustrious photographer see himself? Is he an artist?

He is quick to answer: “Photography is not art, painting is not art. You can’t teach art and that’s the irony of art school – it’s whether the person doing it is an artist. So, yes, I am an artist.”

Bailey’s Stardust, sponsored by Hugo Boss, will run from Friday, February 6 to Monday, June 1 at the National Portrait Gallery. The gallery is at the top of Trafalgar Square at St Martin’s Place, London, WC2H 0HE. More details at npg.org.uk