When Harry met... Jilly Cooper
Harry Borden recalls two portrait sessions, taken over 20 years apart, with the best-selling author
Portrait photographer Harry Borden enjoyed a splendid time at both his encounters with novelist Jilly Cooper
Jilly Cooper CBE is known as ‘ The Queen of the Bonkbuster’ for her racy best-selling books that include Riders, The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous and Mount! She’s had an extraordinary life, starting her career as a publisher’s receptionist, writing her first newspaper column in 1969, and subsequently making a successful career as a novelist.
I first photographed her at her Gloucestershire house in March 1996. At that time, I was 30 and just starting to get the occasional job for the Observer Magazine. In this case, Jilly had personally requested that I do the shoot, because she had seen some pictures I’d taken of dog owners with their pets. When I arrived, she kept exclaiming, ‘My dog photographer! My dog photographer!’
I was there with an intern at the paper, Tiffanie Darke, who was doing the interview. She has since become a successful editor and novelist herself. Jilly conformed to the ‘romantic novelist’ stereotype and was saying, ‘You two make a beautiful couple. Are you together?’ The shoot was constant fun and jollity. I realised that although Jilly is creative and effervescent, she’s obviously also quite rigorous and professional in terms of her ambition and the way she’s managed her career.
The photo (right) shows her in the doorway of her ‘shed’ – a building in her garden in which she did her writing. I now realise how much the aesthetics of editorial photography have changed over the past two decades. In the ’80s and ’90s, it was very mannered and contrived, whereas now I think it’s much less formal.
I took the shot using my Hasselblad CM with an 80mm lens and a roll of colour transparency film. It was taken at dusk, so the light was quite low. The entrance to the shed was in a little glade in a wood, so I used a Red Head continuous light as a fill light. That made the daylight that was bleeding through the trees much more blue. The effect is quite atmospheric and I think the picture works very well.
As an aside, I should mention that I don’t shy away from working with animals or children; I relish the challenge of getting a good portrait. However, I usually give the subject a bit of a pep talk beforehand and say, just forget the animal is there and concentrate on the camera. Otherwise people can be very distracted by their pets. The key is not to make the subject aware of the animal, though I do warn them I am likely to do silly things to get the dog’s attention.
Another meeting
When I was commissioned to photograph Jilly a few months ago by The Sunday Times, it was nice to meet her again. She’s now 81, though very young in her manner, and she seemed to remember me. I was immediately offered a glass of wine, which I eschewed in favour of a cup of coffee as I try not to drink alcohol when I’m working.
Jilly was the same mixture of frivolity and seriousness. The shoot took place while the World Cup was on and we had to work the photography around the matches being shown on television. Jilly was surprisingly knowledgeable about football and told me she was in the process of writing a book about Premiership footballers, titled Tackle!
We shot a number of portraits around her house and garden, but the head shot (left) was taken in her bedroom. There was daylight coming through the window and some yellow-brown wallpaper that made an attractive background. I shot it using my new Fujifilm GFX. I like the shallow depth of field in the shot, but at the same time it’s sharp where it needs to be.
Seeing the two pictures also reminds me that I’m more interested in the emotional connection between myself and the subject than I was 20 years ago. Back then, I was still trying to come to grips with mastering photography as a medium and that’s quite
‘I now realise how much the aesthetics of editorial photography have changed’
a difficult hurdle to overcome. But once you feel sufficiently in control of it, you can concentrate on having an authentic connection with the subject.
It was also more of a discipline to shoot on a medium-format film camera and use a light meter; the whole process was slowed down and you couldn’t react in a spontaneous way to the extent that’s possible now.
When I took that picture, Jilly was just talking and laughing, and it was much more of a genuine moment than something I might have shot in the past. It’s a picture of someone who is remarkably vital for her age, which I think is partly because of her personality and partly because she’s someone who has spent her life having fun.