GQ hired Barry to do many shoots during the time I was associate art director there. Barry was always a complete perfectionist and was usually very difficult to get along with. But when we’d return home and look at the pictures, they would be so beautiful that we would always book him again.Barry was based in London when his agent,Frances Grill, first brought his book to GQ. It was filled with Uomo Vogue covers and tear sheets from British Vogue and other glossy European magazines and contained some of the most beautiful fashion photographs I had ever seen. The thing I remember most about his pictures was their lushness, like the one of a black woman dressed in hot pink walking across a mud flat somewhere in South Africa with about ten thousand flamingos taking flight in front of her.
Brian Burdine, Senior art director, Walt Disney Direct and Childcraf Corp.
In the 1970s Barry McKinley helped change the way men’s fashion was photographed by introducing movement, casual poses, and outdoor settings into his pictures. He worked as a fashion photographer all over Europe during the 1960s and then moved to New York and worked for magazines such as Esquire, GQ, and Interview. McKinley was born in NewZealand and lived in Australia, where he studied medicine before taking up photography. He died in 1992.
