The sultan of swing

A photographer who has often been overlooked, Lichfield caught the spirit of the 1960s. By Sean O'Toole

There is nothing quite like upper-class scorn. When Patrick Lichfield, the eldest son of the fourth Earl of Lichfield and his short-lived wife, Princess Anne of Denmark, told his family that he planned to give up a career in the military for cameras and the chemical romance of the darkroom, his proposal was met with cool condescension.

A photographer, one family member is reputed to have crustily remarked, is "worse than being an interior decorator, [and] only marginally better than a hairdresser".

Lord Lichfield, a bouffant upper-class boy and cousin to Queen Elizabeth, who went on to become a well-known English celebrity portraitist, was unperturbed. Aided by his grandfather's decision to donate the family estate, Shugborough Hall, to the National Trust in lieu of duties following his father's death, the young fifth Earl of Lichfield chose photography.

His decision neatly coincided with larger shifts in stuffy old England, as is revealed in a new book and exhibition devoted to the photographer.

Lichfield started working in the early 1960s, the start of a tumultuous decade about to find its swing. Although schooled in all the right places, his posh birthright was by no means a useful calling card. People were disinclined to take him seriously, his establishment background closing as many doors as it opened.

"People tend to take a political view of what I might be rather than what I am," offered Lichfield years later. "That has led to a lot of pigeonholing. Then again, doors have opened that might not have done if I'd been David Bailey."

Although far less celebrated than Bailey, a working-class youth whose dramatic close-ups came to define the temperament of Swinging London, Lichfield was as much a part of the heady scene as Bailey or Terence Donovan, another bad-boy photographer of the period.

"We did behave quite badly, but it wasn't so much an immoral as an amoral decade," Lichfield once reminisced in his upper-crust manner. "I drank too much - we all did - smoked the odd joint and saw the world on the arm of a pretty girl at somebody else's expense."

Behind the camera Lichfield was far less brazen. His work nonetheless caught the eye of iconic Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, who gave him a five-year contract. Lichfield memorably photographed the Duke and Duchess of Windsor luxuriating in their Parisian exile. Being of the same class, his photos were intimate, in a word familiar.

The former king, who abdicated to marry a commoner, knots his tie. His wife, the American socialite and divorcée Wallis Simpson, is shown at a party wearing the same Givenchy striped dress as another guest.

Royal assignments are a staple of Lichfield's portfolio. In 1981 he was the official wedding photographer at the union of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer. This seam of his work is both safe and polite. It may explain why Lichfield is, for the most part, ignored in standard histories of photography.

A new exhibition of 40 classic and unseen works in London aims to revive Lichfield's ageing stock. The exhibition coincides with the launch of a new book. Titled Perceptions, it includes its fair share of royal photographs, but makes up for this with its Dorian Gray-like portraits of men and women who in real life have aged and sagged and greyed.

The book includes youthful portraits of Mick Jagger, Joanna Lumley and Grace Coddington, the latter the style maven whose sartorial eye underpins the success of US Vogue.

Although much of his fashion work now feels antique, lacking the elegance of Irving Penn or urban zing of Richard Avedon, Lichfield's portraiture had the capacity to sing. One photo in his new book is the lifebuoy that rescues an entire career.

It is 1971. Lichfield is in the back seat of a car speeding through St Tropez. In front of him, in formal wedding get-up, is Mick Jagger and Nicaraguan-born model Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias.

His photo shows Jagger in joyous ecstasy. Eyes pinched closed, mouth agape, the man who could get no satisfaction in the 1960s looks to be on the edge of an orgasm. His new wife, her white jacket open to the stomach, boob flashing, is all smiles.

"My marriage ended on my wedding day," she would later say. The couple divorced in 1978. But that is the future. The opened champagne bottle wedged between Jagger's legs is the real point of focus. It lends this celebratory image its enduring sexual fizz.

Lichfield was not only the best man at this union, but a sort of visual historian there at that moment when the breezy ease of the 1960s hurtled headlong into the dreary decade that followed.

• Perceptions by Lichfield is on at Chris Beetles Gallery until January 7