He is famous for being a part of the Swinging Sixties and his pictures of Mick Jagger, The Beatles, Michael Caine, Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton and Andy Warhol - but Bailey also took photographs that were rather more gritty in subject matter.
Some of these images of East End characters go on show today for the first time, more than 50 years after they were taken.
An exhibition called East End Faces features ordinary people and scenes of east London in the 1960s, the area where Bailey grew up.
Now 74, Bailey was born in Leytonstone but spent his childhood in East Ham. Growing up during the Second World War “was normal, not scary. I didn’t know a time when there wasn’t a war because I spent all my time from the age of two or three to eight in a coal cellar really. The ‘60s were a bit like that except there were no sirens,” he told the Daily Telegraph in an interview last summer.
The exhibition goes on display at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, east London, as part of a programme of events to encourage more visitors.
Of the two previously unseen-in-print portraits, one features a bespectacled elderly man in a suit smoking a cigar over a pint in a Bethnal Green pub in 1962.
The other is of an urchin-like boy carrying a crate of bottles on his shoulder in the same area in 1961.
The museum, the childhood home of 19th-century artist Morris, is celebrating six months since it was brought back from the brink of closure by a multimillion-pound refurbishment, which was partly funded by Lottery money. Since its reopening last August, the number of visitors has increased four-fold.
The gallery recorded 42,386 visitors from September to December 2012, compared with 10,699 for the same period in 2010, before it closed for refurbishment.
A William Morris Gallery spokeswoman said: "All of us at the gallery have been overwhelmed by the success of the redevelopment and the huge, positive impact it has had on attracting new audiences.
Bailey, who became one of the first celebrity photographers and helped define the Swinging 60s, is best known for pictures of the likes of The Beatles, Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger and Michael Caine.
East End Faces runs from today until May 26.
