# MASTERING Portrait Photography  |  Full Harry Borden Interview

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Jamie Windsor
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8CyAL-P0O8
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/43977

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

In my last video, I shared a condensed and highly edited version of my interview with renowned portrait photographer Harry Bordon, focusing on the key educational takeaways. However, our conversation was much longer and there's more insights and anecdotes that I thought were worth sharing. So, for those interested, here is the full uncut interview. So, you've had and still very much do have a very successful photographic career. You've got two World Press photo awards. you've had a solo exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery. Can you tell us a bit about how you got to the position where you are now? Um, I think probably my whole kind of ethos right from the word go was kind of the path of least resistance. Just uh how can I sort of contrive to have a life that is fun and uh you know really just short-term gratification actually. Um, and it was only sort of, you know, I initially I went to college because two friends were I found out they were going to Plymouth College of Art and Design. And so I like the idea of, you know, playing snooker with them down on Union Street and swimming in the sea, swimming in the hoe. And I thought we could go clubbing, you know. Oh, and by the way, I kind of photography is fun and undemanding. And then, you know, one thing leads to another. You know, a jigsaw puzzle starts to take shape and then your priorities change. I kind of jettison. I didn't jettison them because they were my school friends, but I sort of got drawn to other people who influenced me who were kind of more serious about the medium. So, the first sort of um year I was in danger of being booted off the course. And then in the second year uh I managed to persuade them to let me to stay cuz I hadn't been attending uh the requisite amount of uh attendance was not met. Uh and then so in the second year something happened. And I met this guy and he was sort of probably a little bit competitive and we sort of um were serious and competing against each other and um you know I started to fall in love with the medium um and it's been a long kind of journey um and so you know when I came to London initially I thought I want to have a one-bedroom flat uh a Golf GTI and a mountain bike. That was that those were my kind of the uh the holy trinity. And then, you know, I met and married Fred's mom. Uh you know, I had a child. We needed more space. I ended up buying a house. And actually, it's quite prosaic and actually vulgar to talk about, but really I made good choices. So, I was sort of committed to being in the in my a family man. Uh and I didn't sort of go into the Grouch show club and get a coke habit. I sort of paid off my mortgage and I just it was about the work and about being a good dad. And then Fred and Oscar were born and we needed a bigger house and you know it wasn't that I had some master plan. I just sort of always was aware of my burn. So I lived very modestly. I still do. You know, I buy all my clothes from charity shops and I keep it very simple and I try and really never forget the things that I derive pleasure from and I sort of concentrate on those and so I never really let photography become a chore and so initially I was working for trade magazines, you know, anyone who would pay me because I came to London with nothing. I basically uh was sleeping in uh on the floor of my friend from college. Uh and after a while we just sort of uh stopped trying to uh you know maintain our boundaries and I was sort of we like we were Morham and wise sleeping in this double bed. you know, we'd talk about our days and we'd spent the whole of I mean, I'm sure the other guy living in the other room probably thought we were a couple, but we'd sort of spent the whole of our time at college, you know, uh, kind of trying and failing to kind of get a girlfriend. So, we were kind of we were quite comfortable in our sexuality. But basically, um, you know, we we tr back then you could work for trade magazines. So I was working for campaign and marketing and PR week and all these boring magazines um that you know as a byproduct of doing thousands of jobs for them literally um you know several a day I uh actually honed my craft. So I sort of it enabled me to sort of go into a sort of an environment a room and immediately sort

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00]

out the visual wheat from the chaff and uh and so that by the time I was working for and you find your own level you know I sort of worked my way up the food chain as a gradual process. So, for instance, these trade magazines I might get the opportunity to photograph someone famous that I could put into my portfolio and then I could go and see the independent uh on Sunday review because the Sunday Times and the Observer wouldn't give you any jobs because back then it was mainly middle-aged big photo male photographers mainly like you know David Bailey um Barry Latigan, David Montgomery, these John Swanell these names from the 80s and so it was a different type of environment, but you kind of find your own level. Um, and that's what happened over time. I uh worked uh I carried on working for all anyone who would pay me. Uh but by the time I had a commission say from the New Yorker, I was really battleh hardened, you know, I really kind of was confident uh in my kind of grasp of the medium. I was really able to kind of express myself and get something interesting, you know, and I remember those shoots very well. There isn't one sort of defining thing. There isn't a sort of strategy. There's a sort of a general kind of um ethos of having fun and being playful and just enjoying it. Um not overthinking it. um never be I'm never kind of um stymied by uh feelings of uh either I'm in competition. I mean I'm competitive person uh but it's highly subjective. So really all I all I've ever tried to do is um take uh get some pictures that make the picture editors look good and then it's a virtuous cycle. they'll get you more that will get you more commissions and you then you make them look even better and then eventually you get to the point where they see that you're working for you know you're shooting covers for the Sunday Times magazine so campaign it's a sort of a gradual process I probably carried on doing these jobs because I like to be shooting working but they stop commissioning you because it's a bit embarrassing because you're kind of like um you know you've kind of moved on uh but then And that happened over time. Uh, and it was sort of a kind of an evolutionary process. So there there isn't one kind of moment where you kind of have come out of the primordial swamp and become a different animal. It's a sort of a gradual you sort of look up around you and you realize you're in different company. So when you start I mean there are other people that are really famous photographers like I remember Platon he was working for campaign and marketing. He probably wouldn't thank me for saying this, but he was working for those trade magazines and that's probably why he's such a great photographer now because he's sort of honed his craft. I mean, it's really the simp the best way to improve as a photographer is to take more pictures and it's nice if you're working for these magazines that are further down the food chain because there's less pressure. It isn't that you're going to feel completely mortified if you screw it up. So, was photographing celebrities always a goal of yours? I'm not uh enamored uh with the world of celebrity particularly certainly I'm prient and you know I kind of have I'm sort of inquisitive uh by nature and certainly people if you define celebrities as people who've done something noteworthy of interest then you know they're inherently interesting. Um, I would definitely say that celebrities uh or i. e. anyone that you get to photograph is a good barometer of where you are in terms of your uh portrait photography. And by this stage I sort of would regard myself as a portrait photographer. But I uh I think it was quite healthy that I didn't uh set out I mean I've had assistants and they've uh I can think of my first assistant Sarah Dunn and all she wanted to do was be a Hollywood photographer and she works in LA now and that's what she set out to do and she wasn't really interested in photographing ordinary people. She was as she would probably see it. I don't want to do her down but basically I think everyone is sort of fascinating and so I purely as a mechanism by which I could sort of judge my uh the how people valued my photography uh photographing celebrities is useful mechanism for that. Plus, of course, as since

### Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00) [10:00]

1988, the default is you own the copyright of the pictures. And so therefore, if you photograph a picture of um Robin Williams or whoever, then uh there's a chance, as with Robin Williams, actually, it's a good example, that 20 years later, the picture could get used on the cover of his autobiography after he's died. in a coldly mercantile way, it makes sense to photograph celebrities because more people will see your pictures and more people will make assumptions about you as a photographer and they're all good. You seem to have a real ability to take those portraits that end up getting picked for things like the covers of books or they end up on permanent display at the National Portrait Gallery. So, what do you consider to be the qualities that make up a great portrait? What is it that makes an image unique and memorable for you? I think for me, it's encapsulated in the in a phrase that a portrait is a record of the relationship you have with the person on the day. And so, it's about connection. And there can be kind of a complete lack of connection. Like I photographed Terrence Conraan a few times and you know he was quite a sort of difficult and kind of hostile presence. You know I think he really appreciated the value of the aesthetic you know with the Conrad shop and everything but being photographed was something that he thought was probably a tiresome thing to be involved in. But there's a sort of bullishness and the one of the first pictures I took I remember he was puffing on a cigar and I put him in front of this abstract painting and it I think it got into the equivalent of the Taylor Wessing the National Portrait Gallery competition. It was one of my first back in about 91. And so you can have no connection or and that's a sort of connection in itself a complete bullishness uh and hostility to the photographer which you can work with but by and large it's a it's dian arbus you know it's that intimacy it's that connected that feeling of being close to someone and it's a connection through the eyes you know and so for me the eyes are really key to a portrait often uh but then you know rules are there to be broken. So um we were talking earlier about that Dian Arbus picture of the girl at a wedding, a little girl holding a little rose uh bowl and um you know the eyes are completely blank and it's it's strange because of that. So I don't have any kind of hard and fast rules but by and large I like to it's also about how I want to live my life. I like to sort of have a meaningful connection with someone and make a new friend perhaps. Um, I mean that's just a wonderful sort of byproduct of doing what I do is you have this connection which interestingly enough having uh been in psychotherapy I would say uh that the psychotherapist that I spoke to made a kind of an absolutely telling observation when they pointed out that the perfect environment uh for someone who photographs celebrities is having a narcissistic parent. And this was after the therapist had sort of declared that my father was probably a narcissist, probably quite rightly. But if you have a parent like that, you kind of grow up with a hyper sort of vigilance and an awareness of where people are at and you learn uh and if attention from a parent is is scar scarce, you learn sort of what to get attention and really a lot of the time you're going into a hotel room. uh there's a whole conveyor belt of interviews and photo shoots going on and you have to differentiate yourself from the other photographers and interviewers. So you have to have a sort of forceful personality and you're able to bowl into a situation and you know sell yourself uh in but it's kind of it's a paradox because the way to do it is is to seemingly not care or not be trying to do it. And so it's not something I consciously do. It's probably that little boy trying to get his father's attention. Uh and that's what I'm doing. You know, probably if I analyze it, distilling that down to some practical advice. I think know yourself. So sort of know understand where you come from, what your motivation is, who you are, how you're perceived. when I photograph people like I remember photographing Sarah Cox and she'd just been photographed by this other photographer and he'd probably, you know, was very kind of charming and good-looking guy and he conformed to the stereotype and she'd basically felt very

### Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00) [15:00]

very uncomfortable and the shoot had been drawn to a close and this was a re-shoot and she told me all about it and everything and you know it's like Jerry Seinfeld said, you know, I'm not an orgy type of guy and I'm not a medallion type of guy. I'm kind of like, as Fred described me, a sort of weird, intense old guy, you know, and so when I did Sarah, I was sort of a weird intense younger guy, you know, I'm sort of uh, you know, a thoughtful kind of maybe back then particularly slightly neurotic guy. And so know yourself. you know, I'm not going to be the charming guy, you know, like, you know, Mario Serenti with Kate Moss or anything. I'm not going to be that guy, you know, and then you can have an authentic exchange. The times that it's failed, I remember doing Adrien Brody. I still got good pictures, but I found out that he was really into hiphop, uh, which you wouldn't think, but he's really into rap and stuff like that. And um and I found myself I just found that fact bringing that up and I and it just made a completely Ursat fake kind of conversation that led nowhere because it wasn't me being me. It was me sort of researching the subject and sort of feeding him what I thought he'd want to talk about. A lot of your portraits are environmental. The spaces that you pick and how you get your subject to interact with those spaces I find very interesting. your shot of Tony Blair that sticks out particularly in my mind because there's something slightly surreal about it about that location with the doorway and the anacronistic telephone and the hose. What is it that you look for when you're looking for a space to take a photograph of someone in? Do you have preconceived ideas of what you want before the shoot or do you just go with what you find on the day? I love it when picture editors basically say you haven't got much time. You know, it's going to be difficult. I mean, as long as there's available light. Uh, and it's completely serendipitous. I don't like to have any preconceived ideas. It's like jazz. I mean, you basically I just turn up and that Tony Blair shoot was like that. It was I'd shot him a month before and I'd uh been ushered into the cabinet room where all the photographers tend to take the picture. And so because I'd done that already, I was able to persuade um Alistister Campbell that we should do it outside. It was at the weekend and he was being interviewed by Kamal Ahmed and Andrew Ronsley for the Observer. And so I took some pictures of him being interviewed and then I had a wander around number 10. And the garden is kind of weird. It's like this little oasis of calm and so on. And then I happened upon that door. And I think it's an element of my photography which isn't really about portraits. Um you know before I had the confidence to sort of take portraits of people which I find much more rewarding. Um, I would obviously take pictures of things and what I would look for is a weird atmosphere, uh, a sort of graphic sort of tension and something that's sort of indescribable. Um, and as I've got older, I'm my I've been like a sort of truffle pig kind of sniffing out truffles and my sensitivity to these uh these places has become more acute. Um, I remember I had a school, a college trip to Paris and I took all these pictures in a very intuitive way wandering around Paris and the pictures sort of when I developed them, they were just 35 mm. They had often a weird kind of quality to them. Like there was sort of ghosts hiding in the architecture of these sort of dilapidated buildings or wherever it was the Pompadoo Center or whatever. there weren't any people or very few people in the pictures and that was sort of I think the beginning of it. Um so I look for an interesting space a space that sort of intrigues me on a very intuitive level. Not I can't sort of write down a bullet point list of things that I look for. I just sort of trust my instincts and it can be some weird light that's reflecting off a building and then coming back in and kind of creating this this strange light. I mean, there's a picture I took of my mom with uh you know, before she died and she's just sitting on the bench and the light there's no light on her and the lights reflect. The sun is going hard onto a greenhouse and it's coming back onto her and she's sitting next to the dog on this bench. So, I just look for strangeness and weirdness and then I pop someone into that location and record the relationship that we have on the day. So, I noticed that props uh appear quite regularly in your portraits, and this

### Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00) [20:00]

something I'd like to ask about because I particularly like that one uh of Lena Dunham sat on the pink flamingos again because I think it just has that slight edge of surreality for me. Um, so I remember you saying that this was shot in Wales and um, there's something about that sort of overcast British weather in this Welsh garden with Lena Dunan just sat on these bright pink inflatable flamingos. So, how much do you plan when bringing props to a shoot? Is it something you put a lot of thought into? Do you choreograph it a lot? I kind, you know, I I'd love to say that I'm not that guy, you know, I'm not David Lash Chappelle. I tend to kind of get shoehorned into doing that. And the Guardian basically, she was writing a piece. I think it was about Love Island. And so the Guardian suggested she had these uh she'd got one of those they all had those water bottles that they were drinking from in Love Island. And uh so we had those and the guardian said, "Can you pick up a sunbed? " uh and we can shoot her against the sunbed maybe. You know, it's completely ridiculous and badly organized. And I got to Wales in the end sort of just before it was about to get dark. So, it was really by the skin of my teeth, but it also meant that the light was good. But I went into, you know, Aldi and I saw the pink flamingos at the big paddling pools and it was quite good because I sort of was able to buy them, use them in the shoots and then give them to my kids. But basically I bought that those and uh you know whenever I have been pressured into bringing along props and everything, it has actually worked out quite well because I sort of do improvisation. So sometimes it can take you to good places or maybe I'm just remembering the times it's worked well. So, for instance, I was photographing Paul Mertton, you know, from Have I Got News for You, and my assistant gave me these wax lip lips, and we tried to get Ronnie Corbett uh to wear them when I was photographing him, and he was sort of very serious about his comedy, and he wouldn't do it. And so, they were just in the car, so I brought them along. And then Paul Mertton didn't take himself quite so seriously and wore the lips, and they worked well. So with Lena Dunham, I loved her. Uh I loved her since Tiny Furniture. So it was kind of I felt that we had a really good rapport as well. There were no boundaries. She's not a boundaries sort of person. And you go straight in deep, you know, and you know, in terms of our uh heritage, we're the same as well because we're both half Jewish and we have sort of uh I just sort of felt that she was considerably younger than me. we had a lot in common and we immediately uh struck it off. Uh and uh so and she's wonderful to work with because she was just really happy to go there, you know, and so that the other pictures were interesting as well, you know, and I love the fact that she's so comfortable in her body, you know, and could just inhabit that role. But uh no, it was a good selection and uh I'm happy to talk about that one. Do you have any go-to phrases that you use uh to get people to give you that right facial expression or the right demeanor? Do you have any specific things that you like always ask people to do? Yeah, it's weird. It as you were saying that I was thinking, no, that's just that's the death of spontaneity. And then I thought, well, actually, if Fred was here, and he's assisted me a few times now, he'd say, no, you always say this. And I think it always applies to applies well to celebrities because you're so familiar with their faces that if you say this phrase, you automatically get something that's different from other photographers. But what I tend to say and it I practically say it on every shoot is absence of thought. So that's my thing, absence of thought, because I think sometimes it's nice to see someone in repose. And uh so for instance Lorraine Kelly who I just photographed you know she's all twinkly and smiley and everything and as soon as you get her and you say to her absence of thought and everything just drops slightly and you get to look you get to scrutinize her in a way that you don't normally see when she's presenting the breakfast show. Uh so absence of thought would be one thing. I mean there are certain things I probably do without even thinking about it just in terms of you know uh just ensuring that they're looking at the camera lens and that um you know I but I tend to kind of just ensure that I have an authentic human exchange and that we're kind of

### Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00) [25:00]

you know uh that it that it's a kind of fun and in enjoyable uh process. I mean, at the beginning of many, many shoots, I get, you know, quite often people say, "I really don't enjoy being photographed. " And at the end, they go, "Oh, that wasn't so bad. I actually quite enjoyed that. " You know, and that's because it's sort of not an empty exercise in me stamping people with a treatment or technique. It's just I'm sufficiently in control of the medium that it's about me, a per one person meeting another person. And you know, you're going to be interested in Lena Dunham. I'm I you I've seen everything she's done, so I'm going to be asking her all about it, and I'm be absolutely enthralled to anything she's going to tell me. Do you have any particular favorite focal lengths that you like to use? Uh what are your thoughts on using different focal lengths for portraits? What What's your go-to normally? I think sometime in the past I noticed that all the pictures that I admired that I aspired to take are sort of taken on basically a standard lens and mostly with daylight. I mean the p I mean there are exceptions like that picture of James Dean sort of in a wet street by Dennis Stock. You know that's probably a slightly longer lens but by and large all the best pictures I mean it sounds benal saying it sounds kind of absurd. um and sort of bombastic sort of saying that all pictures are taken on the standard lens but that's what your eye sees uh and then it becomes less photographic um I think it was Carti breast sort of saw your the camera as a notepad so I tend to now sort of see the pictures and then basically the last thing I do is bring the camera up and just I try not to over uh compose the picture or try and make aesthetic judgments ments looking through the viewfinder. And so the standard lens may be slightly wider and also a fixed lens because really the uh kind of definition of uh of someone who's uh recognizable that they have a unique visual fingerprint is a consistency of approach. And so it's about like your video about setting parameters. you know, if I I don't know if it's that or the fact that I started with a camera with a 50 mm lens and I had it for a long time. Um, pictures that are taken on long lenses look like photographs taken with long lenses and similar similarly wide lenses look like they look like photographs taken with wide lenses. But if you think about a po a picture that's taken that closely has the same sort of perspective as your eye, that's always what you see usually see in good paintings or anything uh that is kind of capturing the way that we as human beings sort of see the world. So I would strongly advise if anyone's starting photography to just start with a single fixed lens and and actually u stick with that and get used to actually seeing pictures and then what can happen over time is you develop a unique visual fingerprint because all the pictures in your portfolio really should be the same picture. the same sort of uh obsessive need to compose things a certain way and that's how you get a consistency of vision become known as a photographer. Uh you know that's how you become recognized. You know sometimes people say to me I looked in the magazine and I knew it was your picture before I saw the credit and that's probably because I have a consistency of approach. So, I know you're a big advocate of using natural light in your portraits. Uh, what are your thoughts on natural light versus artificial light? Why do you gravitate towards natural light? It's almost meditative. There's something very profound uh about noticing uh what is already there. And it's kind of, you know, sort of arrogant or vain glorious to kind of attempt to kind of create what the ma the majesty of what is already existing and if only you can see it. Um, and obviously I think you know like with painters or artists you know you've got to learn to draw you know uh and actually record reality uh as it's as it sort of is represented to you correctly. But then and then you can do abstract expressionism. And it's the same with um with lighting. You know I know how to use flash and I've got lots of tricks. you know, I know how Nick Knight would have I, you know, I worked

### Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00) [30:00]

it out and I talked to other photographers and assistants who've worked with great photographers and I have all that in my armory and I have a trunkload of equipment, you know, lighting equipment. But in the successful shoots, it stays in the trunk. Uh because I arrive and then there's some strange light that's just sort of reflecting going through a window and then reflecting on a mirror and then coming back. And those are sort of wonderful sort of serendipitous things. Also, it's probably slightly born out of laziness, but a laziness that ends up making you more productive because if you're using available light and you've got an hour with, you know, some, you know, Baroness Thatcher or whatever and you're in the location, you can get a load more scenarios in the within the time constraints that you have. So, I've heard you mention that your influences are people like Richard Avdon, uh, Deian Arbus, Irving Penn. These photographers, their portfolios are primarily black and white, and yet your work seems to be mainly color. Can you tell me a bit about your choice to shoot color over black and white? What do you feel about color and black and white in contemporary photography? Yeah, I sort of think that um I wouldn't want to hitch my cart to a temporary limitation in the evolution of photography. So, we only, you know, uh saw in gradations of of gray, you know, black and white, monochrome, uh initially because that was how photography evolved. And eventually we got to the point where we could actually we could capture color which more closely resembled the human experience of seeing in color. But having said that I wouldn't pour scorn on black and white. I really I'm actually red green color blind and so curiously I think actually it helps my color vision in a sense because it sort of simplifies things because I'm not kind of overwhelmed. It's already pre-edited down slightly. I don't see color probably as vividly as some photographers do and therefore I can have stronger opinions because it's there are simpler choices. Uh but I started in black and white. I had my own black and white dart room. I love print printing black and white. um it just seems slightly perverse now we're shooting on with you know highly evolved digital cameras that record in color to throw that information away unless there's a very good reason to do so. Um and and I think there are interesting questions that get raised about why we like black and white and it I think and I and I think the reasons we like black and white are all kind of questionable. You know, there's an element of sentiment uh sentimentality. nostalgia. Um there's an element of faux seriousness as though this is a news photograph. It has to be in black and white. And that's because of the context uh in which we viewed these kind of iconic images of the past you know like the girl running the napal girl you know in Vietnam or whatever you know these sort of very profoundly iconic pictures which are part of the landscape of uh of the last century you know in terms of recording recent history. Do you have any shoots that stick out in your mind as being your favorites? And why were they your favorites? And also, is there anyone who you'd like to photograph? Maybe a hero of yours, or maybe you shouldn't meet your heroes. Uh, you always have to be careful meeting your heroes. I was I'll start with Morrisy. So, I know that he's been sort of cancelled and we're not meant to like him or whatever, but I mean just to just to sort of um pate that kind of sensitive boy who was at Plymouth College of Art Design who was listening to the Smiths every night in his bedsit, you know, when I was at college, you know, I'd love to meet Morrisy and photograph him. I photographed Mike Joyce and Andy Rock, the other the sort of rhythm section of the Smiths. And I photographed Johnny Maher. And Johnny Maher is an example of uh what not to do when you photographed your heroes because I, you know, eventually after the interview, we went to his hotel room in London and it was just me and him and I sort of made an embarrassing awkward situation by sort of professing my love for his music in a very kind of obsequous way. Um, so obviously it' be interesting to photograph Moresy. Um, but you know, Larry, David, you know, uh, I can

### Segment 8 (35:00 - 40:00) [35:00]

think of lots of examples, but I mean, you just never know what's around the corner. And quite often people that you hadn't anticipated um, liking can be equally um, lovely. And then people that you kind of uh there is a kind of caveat that sometime it is it would be disappointing to sort of meet Larry David and for him to sort of be so to be really rude or or which I'm sure he might be but you know but if he in a kind of Kirby enthusiasm way that would be fine but if he was sort of really kind of uh unpleasant and sort of didn't treat me in a kind of dignified way that could be something that you might uh regret. I do have favorites. Um I at the moment I quite like it's been 25 years and I do quite like the Spice Girls picture. I It might be because it was sort of around 96 and my daughter Polly was born and you know my little Spice Girl and I was in Bangkok and it was a time when a lot of things were coming together. You know I think I got three pictures in the National Portrait Gallery competition. not that picture which is actually in the National Portrait Gallery, but I like it on a photographic level as well because it has two different lightings in the same picture. So you've got Victoria on one side and she's sort of backlit and then you've got Jerry like the girl in the pearl earring sort of lit by side lighting sort of um Renaissance painting lighting and it's a genuine moment and it's a nice composition and it's also you tend to kind of like pictures but that you appreciate were hard to get. So it was difficult wrangling those girls and to get them all together and get a genuine moment and get it on medium format and shoot it in Bangkok and successfully expose it and then for it to get into the National Portrait Gallery and then people talk about the ' 90s now in a way that they used to talk about the 60s. I have a feeling that picture will become, you know, one of my better known images. And I like it. It's a genuine moment. Um, I tend to like pictures like that you couldn't replicate. I remember there was a picture I did of I can't remember who it was. It was a famous playwright, David Hair or somebody like that. And uh, at the agency I was part of, there was a photographer called Tom Stoddard who's a famous war photographer. He's brilliant. He's no longer with us, but he basically was this Jordi. And I remember they were scanning my negatives and this picture was like a headsh shot and it was just you do the headsh shot because it can be used on the cover of magazine. It can be syndicated. It's silly not doing a headsh shot but as you know I mean a headsh shot is just such an easy thing to do. you know, you just make sure you have a connection and everything's sharp and it's on medium format, so all the ingredients are there, but it's kind of formulaic and it got caught in the Imicon scanner that in the agency and it got ripped in half and everyone back then was sort of wailing and nashing their teeth and worrying about how they were going to tell me and everything. And Tara, who was my agent, sort of told me that Tom had just said, "Uh, it doesn't matter. It wasn't a moment. And you know what? He was right. I mean, leaving aside the fact that you could scan the two pieces and put them back together, it wasn't a moment. And so that was quite an instructive um thing that happened because it made me realize and I did get influenced by the other photographers at the agency and they were documentary photographers. They were into capturing moments. They weren't obsessed with technique. Um, it didn't matter if things were out of focus, if there was sort of impact. I mean, obviously things were meant to be sharp where they're meant to be sharp, but there wasn't this sort of fetishization of photographic technique. It was about telling a story. And so, for me, that's another key ingredient. Whether you've got, it's nice to have all that technical stuff, but if it's a moment, that's the icing on the cake. That's what's important. Now, this isn't something that particularly bothers me, but it does seem to be a common source of internet discourse among photographers, film versus digital. So, you've shot a large amount of your work on film and you seem to have sort of moved to digital now. What are your thoughts on these mediums? Uh, does it even matter? Um, I I'm not uh immune to the uh kind of ritualistic quality of putting a vinyl record on a record player. I have a record player, you know, after having got rid of my record player and then leaving all my records on the wall outside my house for someone to take away, you know, and realizing I need to get with the program and actually selling all my analog cameras

### Segment 9 (40:00 - 45:00) [40:00]

except for a couple which I sort of kept for sentimental reasons. actually not even for sentimental reasons, for completely ridiculously pompous and vain glorious reasons because basically I was uh went to the uh Dian Arbus exhibition and uh at the VNA and there was a cabinet with all the cameras that uh she'd taken all these incredible pictures with. And so I thought when I have my grand retrospective, I'll have to keep some of my cameras for the uh for the cabinet. But I sold most of my film cameras and uh and was very fiercely against the idea that you would kind of um hitch your cart to something that was a soontobe redundant technology. But I do get that there is an a there's a robust quality to film that makes it kind of useful in an archival sense because most digital information will get lost in the ether and yes I mean people say it does slow you down but you know just slow down you know you shouldn't need to kind of pay £3 a framed in order to slow yourself down. I mean, it does seem to be um the there are an awful lot of photographers for whom the most important thing about their work is that it's shot on film. And for me, if that's the most important thing about your work, then you really need to question what it is you're doing because it's just a soon to be redundant technique. It's going to be kind of um eventually not uh economically viable because at the moment, you know, there's a there's been a sort of a last boom a kind of like a a floral bloom of of film, you know, but it sort of does feel like the last days of Rome. And I think at the beginning there was an argument to be made that film was better quality, that it had a um something about it. Uh but now a lot of those cameras, you know, they have film um uh sort of filters that you can put on which and you know without going into all the boring detail, you know, the gamut is much better. And so um what I would say just speaking from personal experience, I shot my la my last book by but one single dad uh for sentimental reasons and maybe to go back to a place that I felt comfortable and happy when I was shooting on film and to reacquaint myself with my old Hasselblad, I shot it on film, but it was such an ownorous process. all the scanning and then cleaning up the files and then getting them the cross curves and the color correction. Um I don't know if I will go back to film anymore. Um I think it sort of feels it feels silly. So as well as shooting all these celebrities, you've also done quite a lot of personal projects. You did this survivor book about survivors of the Holocaust. Uh you've got your book on divorce that uh looks at divorced couples. Um you've got your single dad's book. Uh you've got a load of other projects. How does your approach differ when you're photographing someone who isn't famous as opposed to photographing a celebrity? It's a chicken and egg situation. I mean it well it's just flipped. I mean, basically the reason I'm good at photographing um famous people is because I treat them like they're just people, you know, they're just a human being. We're all just floundering around trying to make sense of the world. And so there's no kind of hierarchy in my mind. So I tend I as I say I tend to concentrate on having an authentic human exchange and that can be with somebody who is living in the woods uh for my woodlanders project or you know four hugs wide or somebody who's a great you know global you know statesman or a banker like George Soros you know in fact um it's easier photographing people that aren't famous because quite often they're more engaged and more uh less time constrained. But the flip side is that quite often they're thinking, you know, as when I get commissioned to photograph someone that isn't famous, quite often I don't show them my work because otherwise they think, well, why are you photographing me? Um and so quite often, um I think people who are less famous, they have less uh guile. um and they can be more nervous and so um but the pictures can have more authenticity and it's easier to get

### Segment 10 (45:00 - 47:00) [45:00]

something kind of um that has some poignency and resonates because the other people are adept. The celebrities are adept at kind of giving you what they want to give you and uh and quite often that's the mark of a good celebrity portrait photographer is actually getting under their skin and getting something that's unexpected. Do you have any views on how advancements in technology have affected photography? Is this something you've experienced personally? Certainly in terms of technology, it's massively helped me because I've I'm getting older. I'm succumbing to human frailty. You know, I had a detached retina probably from playing too much squash and banging into the wall last year. And it hasn't affected my practice at all because the photographs are created in your mind. It's not actually the peripheral elements, the eyes that are capturing the light. It's actually how you see the world and how your brain kind of processes it. Um, and with modern, highly evolved digital autofocus, autoexposure cameras, you can concentrate on what's important, which is sort of recording an intimate relationship you have with a person. And you haven't got to kind of be slightly appearing like you're insincere because you're worrying about f-stops or shutter speeds or the cam. Why weren't the c camera tripod lock or whatever. you can actually um you know that's why the ultimate express uh example of that is the camera phone. So you can just take pictures in a really free way and get technically reasonable results. And so photography can be about less an a kind of process of showing your how technically adept you are and more about recording uh what matters to you in the world. Harry Bordon, thank you very much. Thank you.