Terry O’Neill is one of the world’s most collected photographers with work hanging in national art galleries and private collections worldwide. From presidents to pop stars he has photographed the frontline of fame for over six decades.

He began his career at the birth of the 1960s. While other photographers concentrated on earthquakes, wars and politics, O’Neill realised that youth culture was a breaking news story on a global scale and began chronicling the emerging faces of film, fashion and music who would go on to define the Swinging Sixties. By 1965 he was being commissioned by the biggest magazines and newspapers in the world.

In the 40 years since the little Irish cockney first tasted international success, Terry O’Neill has become the celebrities’ Boswell, a pictorial diarist of the first order, and one of Britain’s most successful portrait photographers. No other living photographer has embraced the span of fame, capturing the icons of our age from Winston Churchill to Nelson Mandela, From Frank Sinatra and Elvis to Amy Winehouse from Audrey Hepburn and Brigitte Bardot to Nicole Kidman, as well as every James Bond from Sean Connery to Daniel Craig.

His forte is satisfaction, making the famous look as though they deserve their good fortune. He isn’t in the business of shattering egos and, unlike a lot of modern portrait photographers, never sets out to demean his subject. A Terry O’Neill photograph is always about the subject rather than being about Terry himself, a gift, if you can call it a gift.