Anthony McGee
Encyclopedia
Biography
Born 8 July 1954 in Highgate London, McGee is one of six children. Growing up next to the Tate BritainTate Britain
Tate Britain is an art gallery situated on Millbank in London, and part of the Tate gallery network in Britain, with Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is the oldest gallery in the network, opening in 1897. It houses a substantial collection of the works of J. M. W. Turner.-History:It...
McGee acquired an early interest in art particularly fine paintings. He was educated in Chelsea, although at age 14 he dramatically left school to work in Pinewood Studios
Pinewood Studios
Pinewood Studios is a major British film studio situated in Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire, approximately west of central London. The studios have played host to many productions over the years from huge blockbuster films to television shows to commercials to pop promos.The purchase of Shepperton...
. McGee created his first fashion portfolio at the age of 17, and during this period he met and photographed subjects including David Bailey, Marie Helvin
Marie Helvin
Marie Helvin is a fashion model, who worked extensively with David Bailey—to whom she was married between 1975-85—in the 1970s and 1980s she appeared in many fashion stories for British Vogue and posed for a series of nude photographs made by David Bailey, which were published in his 1980 book...
and David Bowie
David Bowie
David Bowie is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. A major figure for over four decades in the world of popular music, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s...
. At 18 following a chance meeting with the Editor and Chief of Bazaar Magazine Willy Landels and public relations consultant Lynne Franks
Lynne Franks
Lynne Franks founded one of the UK’s best-known public relations consultancies in the early 1970s and is currently an advocate, communications strategist, writer and spokeswoman on women’s issues, sustainability and consumer lifestyles....
, McGee was assigned his first cover shoot for Harpers and Queen. At the young age of 19 he was shooting his 12th magazine cover; McGee traveled internationally photographing for publications such as British
Vogue (British magazine)
The British edition of Vogue is a fashion magazine that has been published since 1916.When British Vogue was launched, it was the first overseas edition of an existing fashion magazine. Under the magazine's first editor, Elspeth Champcommunal, the magazine was essentially the same as the American...
and American Vogue
Vogue (magazine)
Vogue is a fashion and lifestyle magazine that is published monthly in 18 national and one regional edition by Condé Nast.-History:In 1892 Arthur Turnure founded Vogue as a weekly publication in the United States. When he died in 1909, Condé Montrose Nast picked up the magazine and slowly began...
, Vogue Italia
Vogue Italia
Vogue Italia is the Italian edition of Vogue magazine. Owned by Condé Nast International, it is the least commercial of all editions of Vogue magazine and has been called the top fashion magazine in the world....
, L’Uomo Vogue, Marie Claire
Marie Claire
Marie Claire is a monthly women's magazine first published in France but also distributed in other countries with editions specific to them and in their languages. While each country shares its own special voice with its audience, the United States edition focuses on women around the world and...
, Cosmopolitan
Cosmopolitan (magazine)
Cosmopolitan is an international magazine for women. It was first published in 1886 in the United States as a family magazine, was later transformed into a literary magazine and eventually became a women's magazine in the late 1960s...
, Sunday Times Magazine, Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
and The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
magazine.
McGee currently lives in Primrose Hill with his wife Sandy and has two sons Jack, 28; and Max, 14.
Photographers are artists and constantly seek beauty through light and form. As the fashion editor of Country Life magazine, I have worked with photographer Tony McGee for many years, in London studios and at locations in the UK and abroad. I am indebted to his eye for beauty and his passion for perfection. (Maraldi J G, 2000)
Career
McGee's subjects have included actors, models and other entertainers such as: Daniel Day-LewisDaniel Day-Lewis
Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis is an English actor with both British and Irish citizenship. His portrayals of Christy Brown in My Left Foot and Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood won Academy and BAFTA Awards for Best Actor, and Screen Actors Guild as well as Golden Globe Awards for the latter...
, Rod Steiger
Rod Steiger
Rodney Stephen "Rod" Steiger was an Academy Award-winning American actor known for his performances in such films as On the Waterfront, The Big Knife, Oklahoma!, The Harder They Fall, Across the Bridge, The Pawnbroker, Doctor Zhivago, In the Heat of the Night, and Waterloo as well as the...
, Jeremy Irons
Jeremy Irons
Jeremy John Irons is an English actor. After receiving classical training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, Irons began his acting career on stage in 1969, and has since appeared in many London theatre productions including The Winter's Tale, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the...
, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Anna Friel
Anna Friel
Anna Louise Friel is an English actress. She rose to fame in the UK as Beth Jordache on the Channel 4 soap Brookside.-Early life:...
, Charlotte Rampling
Charlotte Rampling
Charlotte Rampling, OBE is an English actress. Her career spans four decades in English-language as well as French and Italian cinema.- Early life :...
, Jerry Hall
Jerry Hall
Jerry Faye Hall is an American model and actress, also known for her long-term relationship with Mick Jagger, with whom she had four children.-Early life:...
, Tara Shannon, Christy Turlington
Christy Turlington
Christy Turlington Burns is an American model best known for representing Calvin Klein from 1987 to 2007. She has worked on dozens of modeling contracts with companies including Maybelline Cosmetics and Versace. Turlington starred in her fashion documentary Catwalk and Isaac Mizrahi's Unzipped...
, Cindy Crawford
Cindy Crawford
Cynthia Ann "Cindy" Crawford is an American model. Known for her trademark mole just above her lip, Crawford has adorned hundreds of magazine covers throughout her career. She was named #3 on VH1's 40 Hottest Hotties of the 90s...
, Yasmin Le Bon
Yasmin Le Bon
Yasmin Le Bon is a British Iranian fashion model. She was born to an Iranian father and an English mother...
, Naomi Campbell
Naomi Campbell
Naomi Campbell is a British model. Scouted at the age of 15, she established herself among the top three most recognisable and in-demand models of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and she was one of six models of her generation declared "supermodels" by the fashion world...
, Heather Mills, Kate Moss
Kate Moss
Kate Moss is an English model. Moss is known for her waifish figure and popularising the heroin chic look in the 1990s. She is also known for her controversial private life, high profile relationships, party lifestyle, and drug use. Moss changed the look of modelling and started a global debate on...
, Eva Herzigova
Eva Herzigová
Eva Herzigová is a Czech model and actress.-Early life and career:Herzigová was born in Litvínov, Czechoslovakia . She began her modeling career after winning a modeling beauty contest in Prague in 1989, at the age of sixteen. After arriving in Paris, her popularity increased...
, David Bowie
David Bowie
David Bowie is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. A major figure for over four decades in the world of popular music, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s...
, Marianne Faithfull
Marianne Faithfull
Marianne Evelyn Faithfull is an award-winning English singer, songwriter and actress whose career has spanned five decades....
, Debbie Harry
Debbie Harry
Deborah Ann "Debbie" Harry is an American singer-songwriter and actress, best known for being the lead singer of the punk rock and new wave band Blondie. She has also had success as a solo artist, and in the mid-1990s she performed and recorded as part of The Jazz Passengers...
, George Michael
George Michael
George Michael is a British musician, singer, songwriter and record producer who rose to fame in the 1980s when he formed the pop duo Wham! with his school friend, Andrew Ridgeley...
, Tina Turner
Tina Turner
Tina Turner is an American singer and actress whose career has spanned more than 50 years. She has won numerous awards and her achievements in the rock music genre have led many to call her the "Queen of Rock 'n' Roll".Turner started out her music career with husband Ike Turner as a member of the...
, Eva Herzigova
Eva Herzigová
Eva Herzigová is a Czech model and actress.-Early life and career:Herzigová was born in Litvínov, Czechoslovakia . She began her modeling career after winning a modeling beauty contest in Prague in 1989, at the age of sixteen. After arriving in Paris, her popularity increased...
, Shirley Bassey
Shirley Bassey
Dame Shirley Bassey, DBE , is a Welsh singer. She found fame in the late 1950s and was "one of the most popular female vocalists in Britain during the last half of the 20th century"...
, Stevie Nicks
Stevie Nicks
Stephanie Lynn "Stevie" Nicks is an American singer-songwriter, best known for her work with Fleetwood Mac and an extensive solo career, which collectively have produced over forty Top 50 hits and sold over 140 million albums...
, Roxy Music
Roxy Music
Roxy Music was a British art rock band formed in 1971 by Bryan Ferry, who became the group's lead vocalist and chief songwriter, and bassist Graham Simpson. The other members are Phil Manzanera , Andy Mackay and Paul Thompson . Former members include Brian Eno , and Eddie Jobson...
, Daniel Day-Lewis
Daniel Day-Lewis
Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis is an English actor with both British and Irish citizenship. His portrayals of Christy Brown in My Left Foot and Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood won Academy and BAFTA Awards for Best Actor, and Screen Actors Guild as well as Golden Globe Awards for the latter...
, The Sex Pistols and Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa , born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu , was a Roman Catholic nun of Albanian ethnicity and Indian citizenship, who founded the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, India, in 1950...
.
McGee was the first to photograph a young fifteen year old Kate Moss, launching her into stardom. “It was sensational to shoot Kate Moss when she was just starting out. She was terribly shy but very beautiful.”
In 1999, McGee photographed a spread of Heather Mills to help promote her anti-landmine charity. Mills hit by a police motorbike suffered serious injuries, losing her left leg, 6 inches below the knee. The photo shoot consisted of a naked Mills posing both with and without her artificial leg. Mills never released the photos, however they were leaked to the internet in 2008 by DListed.com
Tony McGee has shot campaigns for the designer label Chanel. Other campaigns include Lancome, L’Oreal, Yardey, Bourjois, Winston Cigarettes and Seiko. Aged 24 McGee directed and filmed his first TV commercial for Boots No. 7 brand, for this he was awarded the Gold
Gold
Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au and an atomic number of 79. Gold is a dense, soft, shiny, malleable and ductile metal. Pure gold has a bright yellow color and luster traditionally considered attractive, which it maintains without oxidizing in air or water. Chemically, gold is a...
prize at Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival
Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival
The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is a global event for those working in advertising and related fields. The seven-day festival, incorporating the awarding of the Lions awards, is held yearly at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès in Cannes, France...
. He went on to film over 250 TV commercials working with production companies around the world and under his self-titled production company McGee Films.
Although fashion photography is McGee’s prime discipline, his repertoire also includes Fine Art. In 2001 he published his first book ‘Boxing Ballerinas’ followed by the critically acclaimed ‘Room at the Top’ published in 2008. For 20 years Tony McGee owned a studio opposite the Central School of Ballet in London. The rooms of the school were lined with large windows filling them with light, making a perfect setting for McGee's exquisite photographs of the aspiring dancers. As he worked in his studio opposite he could see the young ballerinas running up and down the 347 steps between their warm-up rooms in the basement and their demanding teachers in the rooms at the top. These images have been collected in the beautiful new book, suitably titled Room at the Top.
Tony McGee has brought a special eye to the subject, one honed for over 30 years in the arcane world of fashion photography at the highest levels. (Joel M V)
As of January 2009 McGee offered Londoners the chance to feel like a supermodel. McGee has opened a studio in Knightsbridge Harrods Urban Retreat to give the public the celebrity photo-shoot treatment. The experience includes a makeover and hair styling followed by a shoot with the photographer. During these shoots McGee has been described as instantly likeable, warm, funny and extremely experienced.
In May 2010 MeGee was invited to speak at Oxford University’s Union to talk to students about how to have careers in an industry not usually associated with the interllect of Oxford. He was joined on the panel by: Supermodel
Supermodel
The term supermodel refers to a highly-paid fashion model who usually has a worldwide reputation and often a background in haute couture and commercial modeling. The term became prominent in the popular culture of the 1980s. Supermodels usually work for top fashion designers and labels...
David Gandy
David Gandy
David James Gandy is an English model.-Career:Gandy began modeling in 2002 after winning a daytime-TV model search competition . At the time he had a job delivering cars to a car magazine...
, V&A’s senior curator Claire Wilcox, fashion consultant Frances Card and VOGUE.COM editor Dolly Jones.
Books by Tony McGee
- 2001 - McGee, Tony: Boxing Ballerinas. Floridita Productions Ltd, UK. ISBN 978-0953997503
- 2008 - McGee, Tony: Room at the Top. Splendor Editions, London. ISBN 978-0955831409