Bailey’s Trouble and Strife - Cockney slang for “wife” - is a darkly erotic study of intimacy, power and perception. Shot throughout the 1970s and published at the dawn of the Thatcher decade, this deeply personal volume was a statement of defiance: sexual liberation and artifice in a conservative cultural moment. It captures Bailey at his most distilled: high-gloss, high-voltage, wholly unrepentant. The portraits of Marie Helvin shimmer with a kind of lucid danger - sex as theatre, body as architecture, gaze as weapon.
Comprising eighty-one photographs - and no text between images - this is a pure photobook: silent, cinematic and charged. Printed on heavy semi-gloss paper stock that amplifies the depth of the duotone reproductions, each image feels intimate and iconic - collapsing fashion into fine art and desire into documentation.
Bound in vivid red cloth and housed in a glossy photographic dust jacket, the book opens with a preface by J. H. Lartigue and an introduction by Brian Clarke.
Excellent condition: Near fine copy. Boards sharp and unfaded. Interior pristine, binding tight, no inscriptions. Dust jacket clean and complete, though evenly yellowed.
