Michael Joseph (1941-) - False start - Pool ladies for playboy, blue inverted authentic darkroom print

“False Start Inverted & Blue” — Original Blue-Toned Darkroom Print from Negative
Photograph by Michael Joseph (London)
Photo taken in the 1980s
Mount size: 40 cm wide x 30 cm high

A rare and electrically beautiful original darkroom print from the negative — False Start Inverted & Blue — captured by the legendary photographer Michael Joseph. Bathed in a deep, dreamlike blue, this surreal, almost cyanotype-like vision feels as though time itself has been cooled and suspended. Bodies hover in tension, suspended between gravity and will, between breath and release.

Taken at the photographer’s covered pool in Clapham circa 1987 and printed in his unmistakable hand, this work stretches the traditional idea of the group photograph into something choreographic and hypnotic. There is a hush to it, a held note. The perfect discipline of the aligned figures, the gleaming arcs of muscle and light, and then—the quiet violence of interruption as the diver breaks from the collective and falls. Order gives way to rupture. Stillness yields to motion. This is Joseph’s quiet alchemy at work: bending both space and perception with nothing more than timing, tone, and instinct.

Michael Joseph is best known for his iconic 1968 Rolling Stones Beggars Banquet session — anarchic, raw, and unforgettable. Yet across the decades that followed, from the ’60s through the ’80s, he became the photographer to whom editors turned when a complex human choreography was required. His group scenes were so distinctive they earned their own shorthand in the industry: simply, “a Michael Joseph.”

This is not merely a photographic print. It is a fragment of British photographic history — a one-off darkroom creation, printed from the original negative, unrepeatable in tone, surface, and presence. For the serious collector of evocative, process-rich photography, this work stands as both object and witness.

Dispatched with devotion and great care, mounted and ready to frame — because singular historical works such as this deserve nothing less.

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