A dashing figure, leonine in appearance with a mane of thick hair, Patrick Lichfield became a photographic chronicler of the doings of the beautiful people who inhabited the swinging London of the 1960s, and through hard work and his contacts he made himself a respected figure in his field.
His aristocratic background, as a first cousin once removed of the Queen, might superficially have seemed a handicap — his two great competitors on the fashionable Sixties photographic scene, Terence Donovan and David Bailey, were proudly and resolutely working class — but it inevitably opened doors to him in terms of the portraiture of royals and peers, notwithstanding his protest that he had to photograph them "through the tradesmen’s entrance, just like everybody else".
And it was a Vogue contract to photograph the reclusive Duke and Duchess of Windsor early in his career which gave a timely boost to a professional life that, to that date, had been unspectacular.
Thereafter, for a period he roved the world taking pictures of near-naked models for Unipart calendars, a glamorous figure associated with some of the iconic sultry women of the era, among them Bianca Jagger and Britt Ekland.
But after a period in the aftermath of the breakdown of his marriage in the mid-1980s, when inspiration and the will to work seemed to have deserted him, he eventually regrouped and moved forward again. Over the last few years he had discovered digital photographic technology and became one of the pioneers in its use.
Thomas Patrick John Anson was born in 1939, the son of Viscount Anson and his wife Anne Bowes-Lyon. His parents were divorced when he was seven (his mother subsequently marrying Prince George of Denmark), and he grew up with his father and grandfather, the 4th earl, at the family seat, Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire, with its 5,000-acre estate.
He was educated at Harrow, where he first thought about making a living from photography, taking pictures of school leavers with a very basic Kodak camera. But from Harrow he went obediently enough to Sandhurst and thence into the Grenadier Guards. There, however, he evinced more enthusiasm for a darkroom he set up for himself in his quarters than for soldiering.
His father had died in 1958, and when his grandfather also died in 1960 he inherited the title from him as 5th earl. In 1962 he left the Army, turned his back on the career of land management which was proposed for him, and buckled down to making a professional photographer of himself.
He went to London where he found work as a photographer’s assistant, doing various menial tasks, but developing his own line in celebrity spotting, and securing a few commissions for tabloid newspapers. Next he established his own studio, doing a mixture of advertising work and private portraits.
When Jocelyn Stevens, the proprietor of Queen magazine, decided to turn his acquisition from a diary of the debutante world to something more in harmony with the ethos of the Swinging Sixties, Lichfield was on hand to provide him with candid portraits of the new breed who were beginning to matter in London.
In this he had stiff competition from Bailey and Donovan, whose native working class accents and backgrounds made them much more in tune with the heroes of the new counter-culture, of whom the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were the principal exemplars.
Lichfield’s background, however, meant a good deal to Vogue when the magazine asked him to go to Paris and see if he could get some portraits of the exiled Duke and Duchess of York. Thrilled with the results, which included some uncharacteristically relaxed and happy looking pictures of this generally melancholic pair, Vogue gave him a ten-year contract, which launched him on his way. He also shrewdly invested in two iconic shows of the period, Hair and Oh Calcutta!, and with the proceeds from the enormous success of both, was able to finance a house in Mustique and what was by now becoming a jet-set lifestyle.
Lichfield, beautiful girls and exotic places now became indivisible, as he undertook shoots for Playboy and 17 successive Unipart calendars, as well as royal portraiture and coverage of the marriage of the Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer, of which he was the official photographer. These activities were encapsulated in three of his early books, The Most Beautiful Women (1981), A Royal Album (1982) and Patrick Lichfield’s Unipart Calendar Book (1982).
Other books were Lichfield on Photography (1981) and Lichfield on Travel Photography (1986), and he also edited Queen Mother: the Lichfield Selection (1990) and Elizabeth R: a photographic celebration of 40 years (1991). There was an autobiography, Not the Whole Truth, which appeared in 1986.
Although a good deal of his work was of the frankly coffee table variety, Lichfield was capable of images which rivetted the viewer in different ways. His audacious 1968 portrait of the actress Marsha Hunt, star of Hair, naked and sporting an enormous afro, had an impact not dissimilar to that of Lewis Morley’s earlier picture of Christine Keeler — similarly untroubled by clothing — facing and looking us boldly in the eye, astride a plastic chair.
In a completely different vein, but no less eye catching was his portrait of the model Paula Hamilton in a figure-hugging haute couture gown. His glimpse of Mick Jagger and Bianca Jagger in the back of a car on their wedding day captured a moment of rock ‘n roll frivolity — and the bride’s arresting beauty. By contrast, Britt Ekland, photographed at Shugborough, was undemandingly demure.
When the digital age dawned with the new millennium, Lichfield pronounced himself hugely relieved to be quit of the tyranny of film, embracing the new technology enthusiastically, and talking pixels with the best of them. He calculated that the move to digital saved him some £75,000 a year in film and processing costs. It also enabled him to do shoots of models and celebrities in exotic locations without the fag of travelling; he was now free merely to edit the subject into a stock background.
In 1992 Lichfield suffered serious injuries when he fell 12ft from the edge of the swimming pool at his Mustique home. Fractured ribs and skull gave him, he said, a sense of mortality, and he gave up a 50-cigarettes-a-day habit and cut down on alcohol.
He latterly divided his time between his family apartments at Shugborough, now owned by the National Trust and administered by Staffordshire County Council, his Mustique home and his London studio. He was a Deputy Lieutenant for Staffordshire and a Freeman of the City of London.
Lichfield married, in 1975 Lady Leonora Grosvenor, daughter of the 5th Duke of Westminster. The marriage, of which there were a son and two daughters, was dissolved in 1986. His heir is his son Viscount Anson.
