Leadership Quote by David Bailey

Bailey is performing the David Bailey persona here: swaggering, amused, faintly unkillable. The line works because it turns what could be a grim or sensational travel anecdote into a self-portrait. The nominal subject is "the cannibals in New Guinea"; the real subject is Bailey's own myth of cool under pressure. "They treated me OK" is the joke's hinge. It's absurdly casual language for a setting loaded, in the Western imagination, with danger and taboo. That understatement is the engine of the wit.

There is also a very specific kind of 1970s masculine bravado in "they didn't make you feel relaxed". He avoids melodrama by shrinking fear into social discomfort, as if the problem wasn't mortal risk but bad hosting. That deadpan minimizes the threat just enough to let him reclaim control of the story. Then comes the punchline: "I'm pretty good at that". Escaping unscathed becomes less a lucky outcome than another professional skill, like framing a shot or charming a sitter.

Context matters. Bailey came out of the ferocious glamour machine of 1960s fashion photography, where image-making and self-invention were inseparable. He wasn't just photographing celebrities; he became one. So even in recounting an encounter in New Guinea, he's curating Bailey. The quote also carries the period's uneasy colonial residue: "cannibals" is doing sensational work, reducing a complex culture to a thrilling primitive backdrop for a white photographer's derring-do. That's part of why the line still lands with a wince. It's funny, but the humor depends on an old power imbalance Bailey was confident enough to treat as material.