When Harry met... Joanna Lumley
Harry Borden looks back on his different shoots with the ever-popular actress and campaigner
harry Borden looks back on his different shoots with the popular actress and campaigner
I’ve photographed Joanna Lumley four times in the past 20 years or so. Each time, she’s exactly as you’d expect her to be: charming, funny, glamorous, and really good company. She always makes you feel as if she’s very interested in you. While she’s always very professional, she’s also someone who hasn’t lost her sense of fun.
My first shoot with her took place in 1997. At the time, she was 51 years old and had already had a career in television and films that had lasted almost 30 years. During the previous four years she’d had enormous success with her role as Patsy in the comedy series Absolutely Fabulous. My job was to shoot portraits that would be published alongside an interview with her in the Observer.
We met at the Landmark Hotel in London’s Marylebone Road, where she had her hair and make-up done. Rather than doing the shoot in the hotel, which would have been boring, I suggested we drive to Regent’s Park.
It was an overcast day in October with occasional showers. It was raining when we arrived and there were very few people around. We sheltered under a tree until the rain stopped, then we took the pictures really quickly. She was wearing a striking long red coat. She had been a photographic model for three years at the beginning of her career, so was very comfortable with posing.
As far as I remember, for the picture with her arms folded around her body ( below), she was just clowning around. As it was the 1990s, it would have been very unlike me to be giving her a lot of direction, in the way a fashion photographer would. I think she could see my enthusiasm and was just working it for the camera. Looking upwards has emphasised her famously high cheekbones.
I took the shot on my Hasselblad 500CM with an 80mm lens and Kodak Ektachrome film. Afterwards, I cross-processed the film, which I was still doing back then. It has heightened the contrast and increased colour saturation in the red coat.
Mixed feelings
However, I regret doing it now, because the negative is more grainy than it should be. With cross-processing you’re really just throwing away information and hitching your cart to an ephemeral style that is going to look dated anyway. So I have slightly mixed feelings about this image, though I still think it’s a beautiful picture.
In 2004, I was asked by Penguin books to shoot Joanna’s portrait for the cover of her autobiography No Room for Secrets. It was quite a straightforward studio shoot. Then in 2011, the Sunday Times asked me to photograph her with her son, Jamie. She remembered me from the previous shoots and we had a good catch-up.
Thinking we had plenty of time, I took my eye off the ball, chatting away; then suddenly she announced she had to go. I hadn’t taken any pictures, so we had to do it very quickly while her cab was waiting outside. I took the pictures and got away with it, but I still feel embarrassed about it. It was such an unprofessional thing to do in a business where you are only as good as your last job.
However, I learned my lesson from that shoot and when I photographed her again
‘She’s exactly as you’d expect her to be: charming, funny, glamorous, and really good company’
in 2013, I made sure I was ready to make the most of it. Joanna had been given the ‘National Campaigner of the Year’ award in the Observer Ethical Awards and I was asked to photograph her at the Natural History Museum in London. There was a special exhibition on show, titled ‘Sensational Butterflies’, for which all sorts of exotic butterflies were on display in a temporary butterfly house.
I arrived an hour early and took my equipment inside this very humid environment, to let it acclimatise. Meanwhile, I set up a daylight studio in the tent. Joanna arrived and we had a butterfly ‘wrangler’ who was asked to place these amazing butterflies on her face. I shot them in different parts of her face – she was a real trooper about it – but I particularly liked this image where the butterfly is on her forehead. It was taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II and a Profoto Pro-7B flash with a softbox.
The only downside to the shoot was that she was doing a campaign for Marks & Spencer at the time and some company stylists chose what she wore. I felt her clothes didn’t look as good as they would if she had chosen them. Also, the colours were too bright and competing with the butterflies. When I showed this image on my Instagram page recently, I decided to improve it by de-saturating the clothing and adding a little blue to tie it in with the background. It’s now ten times better than it was when it originally ran in the
Observer, and is one of my strongest images of her.