Terence Donovan

He was a larger than life personality, a big man in the flesh, a genuine gentle giant according to his friends.

These three men were completely different from their glamorous predecessors, most of whom were effete Knightsbridge and Chelsea butterflies. These men were straight. They lived with or loved their models. They wanted their women to look sexy in their clothes, not simply elegant.

Donovan used the everyday in his pictures, setting his models in the courtyards of council flats, in industrial plants, in offices, in the concrete wastelands of the era, using black and white with great force. It was all miles removed from the baroque ballrooms of Tatler for women, and from the binocular-clutching, shooting-stick perching scenes which had tended to defined male fashion shots.

In the magazines Town and Queen, his pictures set the mood of the times. He was duly published in Vogue, changing its somewhat prissy debutante style as well by bringing it into the real world.

In 1966 Antonioni made Blow Up, a mystery set in London involving a young fashion photographer played by David Hemmings who thinks he sees a murder take place. It contained for the times a shocking amount of nudity, and the randy fashion photographer who bedded the beauties was born. Not that the real men did anything to shatter the illusion.

The son of a lorry driver, Terence Donovan grew up in Stepney. He left school aged 15 to study lithography at the London School of Engraving and Lithography in Fleet Street. He then worked in the phoptographic department of a Fleet Street blockmaker and discovered his metier, joining the studio of the leading fashion photographer of the time, John French. In 1959 he set up his own studio and the leading beauties of the day like Jean Shrimpton, Celia Hammond and Julie Chris-tie were all photographed by him.

He was not, however, the mythical hard drinking , womanising clothes snapper. Although he was married twice, his second marriage to Diana St Felix Dare lasted 26 years and was by all accounts extremely happy. He was, however, unconventional, or at least made the conventional unconventional. He always wore grey flannel suits with a white shirt, black tie and shoes because it saved him the trouble of deciding what to wear in the morning. A townsman to his roots - he had no great love for the countryside - he equally thought holidays a waste of time and did not take them. He differed from many of his peers in that he was also an excellent technician, who maintained his own dark room.

In the early 1970s he turned to work in film production, although famous women like Margaret Thatcher, Princess Diana and the Duchess of York sought him out to take their picture in the expectation, which was never unfulfilled, that the result would flatter while being true. In 1973 he produced and directed a feature film, a spy thriller called Yellow Dog starring Robert Hardy and Carolyn Seymour, but it did not launch a new career and he turned to making music videos and television plays for CBS, and documentaries for London Weekend. He also started to paint, wanting, it seems, more as an artist than the success his photographs had brought him.