Frank Habicht's Photographs of Swinging Sixties London

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Plenty of photographers pointed a camera at Swinging London. Most of them did it from a studio, with lights, assistants and a fashion editor breathing down their neck. Frank Habicht did it from a rooftop in Earls Court, the pavement on the King's Road and the middle of a heaving crowd in Hyde Park.

The German-born photographer spent the 1960s wandering the capital with a Rolleiflex, catching pop stars, art students, market traders, protesters and bowler-hatted City gents in the same frame. His pictures ended up in a 1969 book that's now a pricey collector's item, then vanished for decades before a whole new generation found them. Here's the story behind them.

Quick Answers

Who was Frank Habicht? A Hamburg-born photographer (1938 to 2024) best known for his black and white street photos of 1960s London.
What's his most famous book? Young London: Permissive Paradise, published by Harrap in 1969 and never reprinted.
Who did he photograph? The Rolling Stones, Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg, Vanessa Redgrave, Roman Polanski and hundreds of ordinary young Londoners.
Where can you see his work now? In As It Was: Frank Habicht's Sixties, a 240-page collection published by Hatje Cantz in 2018.

From Hamburg Air Raids to London's Streets

Habicht was born in Hamburg in December 1938, months before the Second World War kicked off. He grew up with memories of the city being bombed, a father who wasn't around and a school record that wasn't exactly glowing. In a 2019 interview with Huck, he remembered being written off as a daydreamer.

When his father came back to Hamburg in the 1950s, he packed young Frank off to school in London. That's where the city got under his skin. A clergyman used to drive him round the poorest corners of the East End, where the vicar was trying to help drug addicts, and those trips stuck with him for the rest of his life.

He bounced between the two cities for a while, studying at the Hamburg School of Photography in 1962, before settling in London for good in 1964. He worked in a hotel to pay the bills, then started selling pictures. Before long he was freelancing for Twen, Esquire, The Sunday Times and The Guardian, among others.

It's worth remembering that Hamburg had its own wild scene at the time. The Beatles cut their teeth in its clubs, and Swedish photographer Anders Petersen later spent years shooting the regulars at Café Lehmitz in the city's red-light district. Habicht, though, went where the noise was loudest in the mid-sixties, and that was London.

No Studio, No Lights, No Problem

Habicht's method was refreshingly simple. He openly admitted he was "not a good studio photographer", so he didn't bother with one. He walked the streets instead, and spent his Saturday mornings at Portobello Road market watching who turned up.

When he did set up a shoot, he used whatever London gave him. His regular spots included a rooftop in Earls Court and a bomb-damaged church near St Paul's Cathedral, according to the New Zealand Herald. He shot in natural light on a Rolleiflex and a Leicaflex, with no reflectors and no assistants.

He wasn't shy about turning the city into a set, though. For one job photographing Pierre Cardin models, he got them dancing, linking arms across a busy street and walking straight at him through the traffic. He also liked slipping a sneaky bit of humour into his frames, which is why so many of his pictures make you look twice.

Later in life he described his camera as "an extension of myself, a partner in my journey", and reckoned you didn't need expensive kit to take a memorable picture. Shooting on film, he said, made every frame count.

Young London: Permissive Paradise

By the end of the decade Habicht had enough material for a book. Young London: Permissive Paradise came out in 1969 through George G. Harrap, with his photographs set alongside two introductory essays by Heather Cremonesi and Robert Bruce. The book's own blurb asked whether young London was a new earthly paradise or heading for premature destruction, which tells you a lot about how nervous the older generation felt.

What makes the book so good is the clash between old and new. Habicht loved putting miniskirts next to pinstripes, and he gave ordinary kids the same attention as celebrities. Back in 1969 the writer Valerie Mendes summed up his outlook neatly in Metropolis magazine: "London without her people would be dead indeed."

Harrap only ever printed one edition. Today a first edition can easily fetch a few hundred pounds from dealers, and copies are held by institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The Rolling Stones in Hyde Park, 1969

On 5 July 1969 the Rolling Stones played a free concert in Hyde Park, just two days after founding member Brian Jones was found dead in his swimming pool. Hundreds of thousands turned up, and Habicht was right in the thick of it.

Rather than fight for a spot by the stage, he turned his lens on the crowd. Deep in the sea of faces he spotted a young woman with heavy, wide-eyed make-up and grabbed the shot. It's been known as Alice in Wonderland and Girl at a Rolling Stones Concert, and it became one of the defining images of the whole era. Decades later it landed on the cover of As It Was.

He'd already photographed Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in 1968, and signed prints from his Stones sessions now sell through galleries. If you're into the band's late-sixties and early-seventies chaos, there's a good companion piece in the Stones' summer at Villa Nellcôte, where they made Exile on Main St a couple of years later.

Lost in a Dream: Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg

Habicht's best-loved celebrity portrait wasn't even taken in London. In 1969 he spent a day in Oxford with Jane Birkin, her family and Serge Gainsbourg, the year their song Je t'aime... moi non plus got banned all over the place.

There was nothing staged about it. Birkin was in great spirits and warmed to Habicht's laid-back approach. Over a tea break they ended up chatting about the Vietnam War and found they shared the same views. Birkin's little daughter Kate tagged along, and in many of the shots Jane's clutching a soft toy called Munkey. Gainsbourg, meanwhile, didn't let go of his cigarette packet all day.

Habicht only found out later how much that toy meant. Munkey went everywhere with Birkin, and when Gainsbourg died in 1991 she placed it in his coffin. The New Zealand Herald later called the resulting photo, Lost in a Dream, the most beautiful picture ever taken of the pair together.

Protest Marches, Playboy and Top of the Pops

Habicht's London wasn't all boutiques and pop stars. He went on protest marches throughout his life, and one of his strongest pictures shows actress Vanessa Redgrave at a 1970 peace rally beside a placard reading War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things. It's a reminder that the sixties' fun and its politics were tangled up together.

He also had a busy commercial career. Between 1965 and 1971 he worked as a stills photographer on films for directors Bryan Forbes, Roman Polanski and Jules Dassin. He freelanced for Top of the Pops in 1969 and spent 1970 as the in-house photographer at London's Playboy Club.

That mix of jobs meant his contact sheets read like a who's who of the era. Alongside the Stones and Birkin you'll find David Bailey, Donovan, Marty Feldman, Christopher Lee and Lord Lichfield, plus Connie Kreski, Playboy's 1969 Playmate of the Year, and Hylette Adolphe from Fellini's Satyricon. Don McCullin was doing something similar with the Beatles on their 1968 Mad Day Out, dragging the biggest band in the world round London for a day of street shoots.

Meeting Christine on the Last Night of the Decade

London gave Habicht more than a career. At a New Year's Eve party on 31 December 1969, the very last night of the sixties, he met an Austrian woman called Christine. He later called their relationship "an everlasting love affair", and they stayed together for 55 years.

The couple had two sons. Florian Habicht became a filmmaker, known for the Pulp documentary and James & Isey, while Sebastian became a musician. Frank even popped up on screen in Florian's film Love Story and had a cameo in What We Do in the Shadows.

Paradise Found in New Zealand

In 1981 Habicht walked away from his international career and moved the family to the Bay of Islands in New Zealand, partly because they'd fallen for the place during a period of fear about nuclear war. There was a catch. Photography wasn't seen as a proper job for immigration purposes, so the family built and ran the Austria Motel in Paihia instead.

He kept shooting, of course. He photographed Dame Whina Cooper, the artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser and Queen Elizabeth II, along with years of Waitangi Day celebrations and protests. Locally he was also famous for playing Santa, and kids were convinced he was the real deal thanks to his thick German accent.

How the Sixties Photos Were Rediscovered

For years the London pictures sat mostly in boxes, but the 21st century was kind to them. A collection called Karma Sixties went on show at the Colette gallery in Paris in 2004, followed by exhibitions in Auckland and Moscow. In 2016 his work featured in Strange and Familiar, Martin Parr's show at the Barbican about how outsiders photographed Britain, which then moved to Manchester Art Gallery.

Then in 2018 Florian edited As It Was: Frank Habicht's Sixties for German publisher Hatje Cantz, a hefty 240-page hardback with 193 photographs. Galleries picked up on the fresh interest and magazines ran spreads of his street style shots all over again.

Habicht died at Kawakawa Hospital on 8 October 2024, aged 85. He kept his dark sense of humour right to the end, joking on his last night that at least he'd never have to visit the dentist again. Fittingly, he died on a Tuesday, and his very first sixties book, which never got published, was called Tuesday.

Street photography has always been about catching people before they know they're being watched, whether it's a student with a hidden spy camera in the 1890s or a German hotel worker on the King's Road. Habicht's London is long gone, but his pictures still make it feel like you could walk round the corner and bump into it.