When Harry met... Hillary Clinton
In a stressful shoot Harry Borden was promised 15 minutes with Hillary Clinton, but only got 15 seconds
Harry Borden recalls the stressful shoot where he was promised 15 minutes but only got 15 seconds
In June 2018, I was commissioned to shoot portraits of American politician Hillary Clinton. She was in the UK to attend meetings at Swansea University’s Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law and the portraits were intended to illustrate a profile interview with her to go in the Guardian Weekend magazine.
The shoot would take place on a weekend, so I would have to give up an enjoyable father-son bonding session with my son, watching an important World Cup match. However, the opportunity to shoot a portrait of Hillary was too good to miss. It was a great job and I was really excited to do it.
On the day I drove for three hours to Swansea and arrived at 10am to meet The Guardian journalist Decca Aitkenhead, who was doing the interview. The event was being handled by a freelance publicist, who had said that I would get 15 minutes for the portrait and Decca would get 45 minutes for the interview.
That day, the university was filled with Hillary’s entourage: it included dozens of scarylooking guys in black cars, wearing mirror shades and communicating on walkietalkies. I was introduced to Hillary’s adviser, who seemed like someone out of political drama The West Wing.
My assistant and I were shown around various rooms as possible portrait locations and we set up our equipment, including a Colorama backdrop. I was shooting with the Fujifilm GFX 50S, a 51-megapixel medium-format mirrorless model, using natural daylight.
But after all this early activity, we sat around waiting for a long time. I’d recently bought a new telephoto lens and to relieve the stress of the situation, I did some longdistance reportage shots of the security men. At one point the publicist said, ‘It seems like she’s not keen on doing the photos’ but I thought the portrait session couldn’t be cancelled at this stage as everything had been agreed.
To encourage Hillary to go ahead with it, I signed a copy of my book Survivor: A Portrait of the Survivors of the Holocaust, which I had brought along and would be given to her. Hillary’s adviser looked at it and made very flattering comments. Things seemed to be swinging back in my favour. Time running out However, as the day wore on, I began to realise that everyone had seen my book apart from Hillary, the one person who could ensure I got time with her. Decca and I were expected to go back to The Guardian with a major interview and some strong portraits, but we were beginning to wonder whether it was going to happen at all. We were starting to panic.
Then, as it got close to 6pm, Decca was called in to do the interview, so I got ready for the shoot. The light was good and I thought this could be a moment when I got a remarkable picture. I messaged the publicist and said, ‘Can we do the pictures?’ There was no reply. I texted her again, and again there was no reply.
My instinct told me something was wrong. I took a deep breath, breezed past the security guards and went into another room. At that moment, a door was just opening and Hillary walked through it. She had her coat on and was leaving, clearly with no intention of being photographed.
Decca, who had been given just 20 minutes to do the interview, felt angry on my behalf and between us we kind of hustled her into the studio. I was determined not to be trodden on and treated badly.
I was so pumped up that I took a few shots handholding the camera with it set on auto exposure, which was just 1/40sec. So I said, ‘Let me put the camera on a tripod and do this properly.’ The adviser was
‘She had her coat on, clearly with no intention of being photographed’
grumbling and the press officer was the most vociferous in trying to stop me, in an attempt to curry favour with Clinton and her people.
Shortest-ever session
I got just three or four frames before the shoot was brought to an abrupt end. I was treated as if I was a paparazzi photographer who had found out Hillary was in the building and dragged her into a room to take some pictures, rather than doing a pre-arranged shoot. The metadata records that I had just 15 seconds to take the pictures – my shortest-ever portrait session.
Hillary’s expression in the pictures is a mixture of incredulity and panic as she tried to communicate to her people to get her out of there. Although I’d been a Hillary supporter during the presidential election, I felt this experience showed that she was just another member of the upper echelons of society who think it’s their right to rule over us. My pictures were used in The
Guardian, but in a short news report rather than part of a big feature. My favourite shot of the four I took is the full-length picture. The similarity of Hillary’s checked coat and the carpet makes it hang together surprisingly well. It’s certainly very different from the carefully composed, bigproduction images that Annie Leibovitz would shoot.
This shoot was one of the worst experiences I’ve had as a photographer and shows that even with many years’ experience you can still get messed around.