When Harry Met...
Harry Borden looks back on a tricky shoot with the best-selling fantasy novelist
I’m sometimes commissioned to shoot portraits of people I really admire. Having in-depth knowledge about someone’s work often helps to form a rapport with them, but it also puts you in a slightly subservient position. Conversely, if you’re not a fan, you can’t win someone over through enthusiasm for their work, but you can look at them objectively and concentrate on getting a good picture.
When I photographed Terry Pratchett in January 2001, it was an example of the latter situation. I was obviously aware that he was one of the UK’s best-selling authors, particularly well-known for his Discworld series of novels. But although his brand of fantasy and science fiction is very imaginative and clearly appeals to many people (he has sold over 85 million books and was knighted for his work in 2009), it just doesn’t float my boat.
I was doing the shoot for an article in the Mail on Sunday’s Night and Day magazine. Pratchett was rarely photographed without his trademark black Akubra hat, but I’d had a request from Night and Day’s picture editor, saying simply: ‘Not all with hat.’
In those days, I would take a full battery of equipment on a shoot: my Hasselblad CM, a Pentax 67, a Fujifilm 6x7 and 6x9, a Leica and probably a Polaroid Land Camera 195. Each of these film cameras had a dierent personality and impressed itself on the way I worked, helping me to get a greater variety of images.
My assistant and I arrived at Pratchett’s house in the Wiltshire countryside, near Salisbury, on a bitterly cold winter’s day. Superficially, the location looked promising: it was a large, heavily oak-built house that I thought would oer plenty of variety in shooting locations. As regular readers will know, I prefer to use natural daylight, but on this day the light was too poor to shoot with inside.
Pratchett wasn’t keen on me exploring the house for other locations and the one room he wanted me to shoot in, his writing room, was really cluttered and a bad environment for a clear and simple picture.
To get around the problem, I had one get-out-of-jail technique: I’d brought an Octa Softbox and just put it behind him, so he was backlit and I was exposing for the softbox. It immediately made the shot look like it had been taken in a studio. I also persuaded him to pose for a close-up head shot without his hat, to keep the picture editor happy, but I needed something else.
Pratchett was just 52 at the time, but his full grey beard made him look older. As a person, I found him to be perfectly nice, but a little nerdy and haughty. He had a narrow idea of how he wanted to be perceived, and, at times, getting him to do what I wanted was like wading through treacle.
Even though it was very cold and beginning to snow, I knew we’d have to shoot outside. He definitely wasn’t keen, but to his credit he eventually agreed, put on a full-length Driza-Bone brown
‘At times, getting him to do what I wanted was like wading through treacle’
oilskin coat and wellies and we went out into the garden.
Although it was a big garden with mature trees, it was pretty bleak and muddy on that day. I can still remember seeing the droplets of rain on my Hasselblad and feel the cold metal of the camera on my hands. His coat was a good prop, because it looked battered, and, along with the hat, added character and an o beat element to the shot. He looked like a wizard.
As the day wore on, the increasingly heavy snow was making me concerned that I might get stranded at this house in the middle of nowhere. I had a shoot with the boxer Chris Eubank in London scheduled for the next morning, so I brought the shoot to an end and started to head home.
Most of the time, when I’m driving away from a shoot, I feel really happy, even exhilarated, especially if I’ve come away with something unexpected. But on this shoot, I was just happy to come away with something. To use a footballing analogy, it had been like a tricky away fixture in which I’d managed to salvage a point.
Therefore, it was particularly nice that one of the images from that day, a shot of Pratchett under a tree [left] was chosen for the National Portrait Gallery and is still the only image of him in the Gallery’s collection. In the end, despite the poor light, the snow, and Pratchett’s reticence, it was a worthwhile shoot. As told to David Clark