When Harry Met
Harry Borden recalls a portrait shoot with the self-styled ‘Special One’
Harry Borden recalls meeting José Mourinho
‘Pictures that are taken quickly and improvised have more truth to them’
In July 2005, I was contacted by a Russian magazine called ProSport. They had contacted Esquire magazine to ask for the name of a good portrait photographer to shoot the then- Chelsea manager, José Mourinho, and Esquire recommended me. We agreed a fee, I hired my assistant, and on the day of the shoot we drove down to the new Chelsea training ground in Cobham, Surrey.
As a football fan, I was pleased to get the opportunity to photograph Mourinho. At the age of 42, the enigmatic Portuguese manager had won the UEFA Champions League with Porto and had just completed his remarkable first season at Chelsea, in which he had guided the team to both the Premier League title and victory in the League Cup Final. On his arrival at Chelsea, he had memorably said in an interview, ‘Please don’t call me arrogant, but I’m European champion and I think I’m a special one.’
On the day, the ‘special one’ was wearing flip-flops and a Chelsea tracksuit in a training facility so sterile that my assistant and I had to wear plastic bags over our shoes. There were lots of different Portakabins and the whole complex of buildings was very futuristic.
As anyone who has seen Mourinho being interviewed on
Match of the Day will know, he is often grumpy and curt. When the time came for me to photograph him, I asked him how I should pronounce his name and he truculently said ‘Call me what you want.’ I was given just 15 minutes to do the shoot.
The atmosphere was awkward at first and I was struggling a little bit. I often find that when I’m shooting portraits, there’s a key that unlocks a situation, and in this case it was when I asked him if he had any children. He talked about his children and asked me about mine, and the situation lightened up a little. I took some shots of him at his desk in one of the Portakabins, then moved to an odd little adjacent building. It had AstroTurf on the floor and contained a weird metal structure with lots of pegs, probably used for airing football boots. I liked the room because it was an unusual setting and because it had a roof of translucent corrugated plastic that lit Mourinho with soft, natural light.
This was one of the first portrait shoots I shot using a digital camera, and I used a Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II and my favourite lens for portraiture, a 50mm. In spite of the fact that he was wearing flip-flops, he looked proud and determined.
After the shoot, ProSport was very keen to get the pictures and started hassling me for them. I ended up having to send them by FedExpress to Moscow, which was very expensive. Then, as soon as my pictures were received, I never heard from the magazine again and never received any payment. Their deceit was annoying. The irony was that if they had said they couldn’t pay me but I’d get to photograph Mourinho, I would probably still have done it.
I don’t do editorial work just for the money; I do it either because it’s a good magazine and I want my work to appear in its pages, or because I’m adding to my overall body of work. I definitely feel my work is documenting the cultural
landscape through portraiture of the great and the good, and Mourinho has been a huge figure in premiership football in the past decade and a half.
I used the main picture shown here in my portfolio for several years, along with my portrait of former Chelsea captain John Terry. I was pleased with what I’d got in the circumstances. It shows that even in an unpromising situation there’s always the opportunity to get something interesting from a shoot. Often, that’s more likely to happen if you can find some light that’s unique or even just a bit different.
Around the same time, other photographers shot pictures of Mourinho in studios – portraits that were carefully lit and planned, and looked slicker. But ultimately, I think pictures that are taken quickly and improvised have more truth to them, and I think they stand up better in the long term. If a stylist had been involved in my shoot, I’m sure they would have told Mourinho to take off the flip-flops and not wear that Chelsea shirt. My picture looks authentic and real because that’s exactly what it was.