He had a great eye for idiosyncratic style, too - be it a homemade knit worn under a canteen worker’s tabard or a DIY PVC top. He settled again briefly in the early 1970s, taking portraits for album covers for United Artists, before moving back to London, and away from commercial photography for good, in 1974.įrom young children in battered sneakers to rockers in bullet belts, Vandenberg’s subjects exude confidence and self-possession. and Canada, living in squats and informal shelters. By the end of the 1960s, Vandenberg was traveling alongside hippie communities around the U.S. He moved to London in 1965, and immersed himself in the city’s music scene, working on the design of the Beatles’ “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album with the artist Peter Blake. On his return he enrolled in art school in Boston and New York, before becoming an art director for the Doyle Dane Bernbach advertising agency - and taking photography classes under the guidance of Alexey Brodovitch and Richard Avedon.
to Dutch parents but raised by an English foster family in Boston, served in the Korean War from the age of 17. Together, his images - many of them unpublished and unseen for decades - offer a rich portrait of the city’s interwoven subcultures.
So he photographed everyone from rockabillies and teenagers in their customized school uniforms to shop workers and proto-punks, art students to so-called Sloane Rangers. After years in the music and advertising industries, he had become bored with feeding the egos of famous people - instead, he aimed to seek out anonymous subjects on the city streets.
On fine afternoons in the mid-1970s and early ’80s, the photographer Al Vandenberg spent hours walking through London with his camera.
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