Samantha Juste, photographed by John d Green for Birds of Britain on 23 August 1966 at his Kensington studio. She was 22. This was the photograph that was published in Birds of Britain in September 1967.
If you read on you will find one of the original vintage contact sheets from that August 1966 session. This shows twelve frames of medium format film, along with chinagraph pencil markings where John had identified strong candidates for inclusion in the 1967 book. Note how the chosen frame, reference 69 on the contact sheet, was tightly cropped and rotated to arrive at the finished version used in the book. John’s innovative crops are a constant feature of Birds of Britain.
Samantha Juste – born Sandra Slater – became famous on British television in the mid 1960s as the “disc girl” on BBC’s Top Of The Pops. She had the job of placing records on the turntable and applying the needle as acts were about to perform. She appeared briefly in Richard Lester’s 1965 film The Knack… and How To Get It and even released a pop single the following year. In 1967 The Monkees appeared on Top Of The Pops, and it was then she met drummer Micky Dolenz. The pair began a relationship which caused quite a media frenzy, prompting headlines like “Samantha traps Monkee” and “Pop girl goes ape”. They married in 1968 and divorced in 1975. She suffered a stroke in her sleep on 2 February 2014 and died three days later in Los Angeles, California.
This is one of the photographs in John d Green’s Birds of Britain exhibition, available to purchase as a signed limited edition for the first time.
