The legacy of the designer and collector David King, wrote Richard Hollis, “is the books, and the images which make history come alive”. Indeed it is, and David himself, digging and burrowing around Europe, became a historical link with a world turned upside down in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution.
Talking about his superb The Commissar Vanishes, he told me that he wasn’t interested in the photography, but “in the people in front of the camera and what happened to them” – that was his politics, that was his humanity.
And then there was his persuasiveness. Once, when I was working on City Limits magazine in the 1980s and he was cover designer – “I want to create covers that look like no others!” he said (and succeeded) – I showed up with our editorial idea of an image for that week’s cover story. “No!” cried David, and, after his unforgettable, manic laughter had echoed round his studio, he provided his image, and I banged out a story to go with it. That was King-style compromise.
The laughter, and sense of the absurd, were all-pervasive. He was a graphics adviser on Warren Beatty’s Russian revolutionary epic Reds (1981), and we saw the movie together at a preview. Twenty minutes in, I sensed seismic shaking nearby. I asked what was wrong. “It’s … it’s terrible!” he stage-whispered (it wasn’t that bad) and resumed his laughing fit.
