Sharp shooter: Patrick Lichfield's portraits capture the essence of an era

Joanna Lumley, friend and photographic subject of the late Patrick Lichfield, described him as being like "a light going on, or a champagne cork popping", and his most iconic photographs have a similarly luminous glamour. This lustre came partly from the blithe beauty of many of his famous subjects such as Susannah York, but also from Lichfield's ability to charm and relax whomever he was photographing. This talent won him a commission to photograph the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981, after which Lichfield became known primarily as a royal photographer. However, a new exhibition – the first since his death in 2005 and his first significant selling show – which focuses on the peak of his creativity when he documented swinging London, alongside some unseen works, should refresh his reputation as a versatile and charismatic artist.

In addition to the tag of royal photographer, The Fifth Earl of Lichfield, first cousin once removed to the Queen, was also known for his pictures of striking women.

The new exhibition shows that, while his reputation for focusing on portraits of beguiling women is justified – photographs of a nude Marsha Hunt, post-breast cancer, and a wistful Jane Birkin both feature in the show, captured in Lichfield's signature seated and curled-up pose – his flair for composition, and his wide-ranging talent, was also suited to more rugged subjects. His portrait of Henry Cooper, which hones in on the boxer's sculptural features, suggests his psychological strength as well as his physical might, while a portrait of Oliver Reed in his overgrown greenhouse evokes the actor's wild, Heathcliff-esque moodiness.

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Other pictures that don't fit neatly with Lichfield's dapper-dressing, high society image are a picture of "Spider", a tap-dancing tramp-cum-local character in Sixties Notting Hill, and an East End market trader at his stall – Lichfield took reportage-style pictures like these constantly. His friend Terry O'Neill, the photographer, confirms that he "took a camera everywhere. He was really passionate about photography and his studio was full of photography magazines. He was always working in private to improve himself."

It was the strength of his enthusiasm for the medium that inspired Lichfield to leave the Grenadier Guards in 1962, where he progressed after Harrow and Sandhurst, to take up a profession that one relative described as "far worse than being an interior decorator; only marginally better than hairdressing".

His privileged background undoubtedly helped his career – one of his first jobs was photographing members of the smart set in which he mixed, and their children, just as Lord Snowdon had. It was his background, too, that probably appealed to legendary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, who sent a telegram to Lichfield's hotel in Sardinia in 1967 saying: "Meet me Crillon Bar Paris twelve thirty September sixteenth. Vreeland". Despite his friend Jocelyn Stevens – who had commissioned him to take photographs of unsuspecting contemporary figures deemed cool and uncool, as the "In" group and "Out" group, for Queen magazine – warning him that it could be a hoax, Lichfield caught a last-minute flight on the Aga Khan's private jet. Vreeland met him at the bar and dispatched him to photograph the Duke and Duchess of Windsor at their house outside Paris. Several of their portraits appear in the exhibition, an unusually intimate and exuberant picture of the pair beaming like newlyweds, and a more noir-ish shot of them playing poker, in which the Duchess stands behind her husband in a composition that suggests she is the power behind the player.

It was the talent he displayed with these shots – and not his background – that earned Lichfield a contract with US Vogue shortly afterwards, becoming only the fifth British photographer after David Bailey, Cecil Beaton, Norman Parkinson and Lord Snowdon to earn such an accolade. Lichfield himself believed that his background "probably closed as many doors as it's opened. People tend to take a political view of what I might be rather than what I am. That has led to a lot of pigeonholing." O'Neill also believes that "his posh background could have worked against him because he was friends with all the salt-of-the-earth photographers such as me, David Bailey and Terence Donovan, and didn't have the same accent."

Ultimately, while his background helped the dapper Lichfield to enter high society, it was his gregarious charm and professionalism that kept him there, and endeared him to his more rock'n'roll friends and clients such as Mick and Bianca Jagger – he gave her away at her wedding. Lumley describes being shot by him as "easy-peasy, quickly over, fun and games", and O'Neill says that he "had an intensity about him. He took the pictures and suddenly it was over. He was a gentleman."

As a royal photographer, Lichfield is often compared to Lord Snowdon, a distant relation by marriage. However, according to Giles Huxley-Parlour, who has co-curated the show, Lichfield and Snowdon's approaches to portraiture in particular were incredibly different. Huxley-Parlour says that Snowdon's method with many of his subjects is to unsettle them with the aim of penetrating their façade to the psyche beneath. Conversely, Lichfield's technique was to put people at their ease and capture them looking as they wanted to look – at their most attractive.

Lichfield, Chris Beetles Gallery, London SW1 (020-7839 7551), 14 May to 4 June