Before he became Britain's most controversial film director with Women In Love in 1969, and long before he gained a burst of brief late notoriety by joining – and storming out of – the 2007 Celebrity Big Brother house, Ken Russell was a freelance photographer. He began taking photographs in 1951, aged 23, having abandoned his ambition to be a dancer, and for six years his work appeared regularly in publications such as Illustrated Magazine and Picture Post.
Now 82, Russell's memories are hazy and his patience limited. "I had lots of time on my hands back then," he tells me. "I used to wander the streets around Notting Hill, where I lived, until something caught my eye. Plus, I had friends who were dancers and I used to do studio portraits of them with props that I had borrowed."
One such portrait, which hints at the surrealism that would punctuate his later films, features a ballerina called Frances Pidgeon, wearing a hip bath. The caption on the TopFoto website, where Russell's work now appears, notes that the image is from a series "based on alternative uses of the hip bath". The young photographer, like the film-maker he would become, was nothing if not inventive.
"I wanted to be a fashion photographer but it was too early for my kind of style. So I began to freelance. I'd suddenly think of an object. A hip bath, for example, and all the things you could do with it. It could be a lady's hat or a pram or a window box, and I'd spend hours exploring all the possibilities in a series of absolutely unbankable photographs."
Russell's photographs remained unseen for 50 years. The agency he worked for, Pictorial Press, was taken over by TopFoto in the late 1970s but Russell's archive was not discovered until 2005. The following year his house in Lymington burned down and, with it, all his original scripts for films such as Women in Love, The Music Lovers, The Devils, The Boyfriend and the rock opera Tommy. Safe in TopFoto's vaults, the original photographs survived.
A selection will inaugurate the new Lucy Bell Gallery of Photography, opening in St Leonards, East Sussex, this week. They are intriguing. When not indulging in a gentle surrealism that has dated somewhat – men on penny-farthing bikes, children dressed in adults' clothes – Russell operated well within the tradition of low-key British documentary photography. He was one of the first photographers to capture fledgling youth culture in London, in a series he called The Last of the Teddy Girls. It often features a striking 14-year-old called Jean Rayner who looks extraordinarily contemporary compared to the teddy boys that lurk or lark about in the background.
"She had attitude by the truckload," remembers Russell. "No one paid much attention to the teddy girls before I did them, though there was plenty on teddy boys. They were tough, these kids, they'd been born in the war years and food rationing only ended in about 1954 – a year before I took these pictures. They were proud. They knew their worth. They just wore what they wore."
Another series from the mid-50s features the regular clientele of the long-gone Cat's Whisker coffee bar in Soho. They are dancing the hand jive to the beat of a skiffle group. "I went along a few times," says Russell. " It was incredibly hot, in a basement, and the kids seemed to have invented hand-jiving simply because there was no space to do anything else. It was really strange to see a room full of people dancing with their hands, everyone doing it, but it was inventive and highly rhythmic and it caught on. I used to join in – it was something anyone could do."
Russell lived for a time on Portobello Road and, in his wanderings around Notting Hill, also captured one of London's first immigrant communities. "It was about six years after the Empire Windrush brought the first West Indians over. Where I lived, there was a racial mix that I caught almost by accident. I was just looking for local interest photographs really, anything I could sell to scrape out a living at the time. Photography was not the well-paid job it would later become." One photograph shows the rent man calling on a tenant while children play oblivious on the street. In its mix of the serious and the playful, it recalls the work of the great Mancunian documentary photographer Shirley Baker.
Unsurprisingly, given the tenor of his later film work, Russell had a keen eye for the eccentric. He photographed the three private eyes that made up the mysteriously named Mask Agency, and the results are part Alfred Hitchcock, part Conan Doyle, with a dollop of visual surrealism thrown in for good measure in the form of a giant eye from an optician's sign.
He was drawn, too, to strong, indefatigable women. One of his subjects, Helen May, was a former ballerina who had danced with the great Anna Pavlova. By the time Russell photographed her, she was living in a house surrounded by old ballet costumes and posters. She, too, featured in the hip bath series, and is pictured "dressed to the nines and waving a watering can" over his favourite prop.
Russell was captivated by an eccentric 72-year-old called Zora Raeburn who lived in a cluttered flat near the British Museum, where she wrote fiction and practised the cello. For 30 years she sent her novels to the publishers to no avail. Russell befriended her and, in his striking portraits, rechristened her Zora the Unvanquished. One unforgettable image captures her standing on a ladder in front of a brick wall papered with her countless rejection letters.
"She was amazing, this woman," says Russell. "She didn't get a single acceptance and she never gave up. She busked to raise funds with a sign saying: 'Dear audience, though I cannot play the cello… ' I think she eventually published one of her books herself."
For all the eccentricity and the occasional whimsy, Russell's photographs are fascinating as artefacts from a particularly austere period in postwar Britain. They hint at, rather than anticipate, his later career. He calls them "still films" and acknowledges that they taught him the value of composition. Even then, though, he was a rule-breaker. One of his most powerful shots is called Feeding Time. It captures a long row of women, some pushing prams, entering what looks like a somewhat austere rest home. It is, in fact, a women's prison. The women are returning to their cells after a day's work in the gardens and chicken runs. The photograph is taken from behind and above and, even though you cannot see the faces of the women, it captures the melancholy and regimentation of their lives. "I like to experiment," he says, "but most of the time I just trusted my instinct."
His real instinct, though, was for film-making. In 1958 a short film he made, entitled Amelia and the Angel, secured him a job at the BBC. The rest, as they say, is history: a series of acclaimed documentaries leading to a series of increasingly controversial feature films. In 1959 he set aside his Rolleicord and never picked up a stills camera again. Did he ever miss it? "No, not really. I just moved on. It was a natural progression."
Looking now at the often restrained atmosphere Russell's photographs exude, it's hard to believe they are a product of the same feverish imagination that created The Devils and Tommy. I have to say I prefer Ken Russell the quiet photographer, although the world of postwar British cinema would have been an immeasurably more mundane place without the louder, more outrageous director.