Duffy Shot The Sixties, Set Archive Aflame

In 1979, a famous British photographer named Brian Duffy walked into his studio and found there to be no toilet paper. His response was only somewhat extreme: He promptly set fire to his entire collection of negatives and slides, renounced the vocation for good and then slipped into obscurity.

That's the kind of anarchist Duffy was, and the attitude stuck with him throughout his life. "I really was a wonderful child," he said recently in a BBC documentary, "an all-around wizard." Trained as a fine artist, with experience in illustration and fashion design, Duffy only turned to photography to support his family. But he and his two contemporary competitor-friends Terence Donovan and David Bailey — commonly called the Black Trinity — ultimately rocked the fashion photography world.

Shooting in the 1960s, Duffy and his peers were in the throes of social revolution — and it became apparent in their photographs, in magazines like Vogue and Elle. There was a freshness, an energy, a rebellion. They photographed models, musicians, politicians and luminaries for ads and stories and covers. Duffy later photographed icons like David Bowie — creating the Aladdin Sane album cover, for example, well before the punk era of colored hair.

The "Black Trinity" photographers became bigger than their subjects in many cases; they were practically celebrities themselves. But, as swiftly as Duffy entered and revolutionized the scene, he left it. "Duffy and aggravation go together like gin and tonic," his friend David Bailey said in the same BBC documentary. In one word, Bailey described him as "difficult." In short: Duffy wanted to do what he wanted, when he wanted. And when he found himself managing things like toilet paper, he fled the scene.

Duffy went almost 30 years without taking another photograph. That is, until his son Chris decided to resurrect his photographic legacy, organizing Duffy's first exhibition in 2009. Chris not only unearthed what remained of his father's archives but also organized new photo shoots with his former models.

The homage was paid just in time: Brian Duffy died of lung cancer last week, age 76, only a few months after the exhibition's close. To learn more about the incendiary photographer, watch this BBC documentary, produced around the time of the exhibition. Duffy may have been a practitioner of "obsequious toadyism," as he put it; but, at least in this documentary, it's hard not to find the crotchety septuagenarian endearing. Past the veneer of surliness, there appeared to be a real twinkle in his eye.

Although he would have probably denied it.