When Harry met
Harry Borden looks back on a lesson he learned when photographing the charismatic rock star and actor
Most of my portrait shoots have taken place either in or around the subject’s home or in a studio. Being sent to an exotic location for editorial work is very rare. But that’s what happened when I was commissioned to photograph the rock star and actor, Lenny Kravitz.
Kravitz has been one of the most successful musical artists of the past 30 years; he has sold more than 40 million albums and won the Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for four years in a row from 1999 to 2002. He’s still making albums and in recent years has also acted in the film series The Hunger Games.
The first time I met him was on a shoot for music magazine the New Musical Express. It was 1991 and Kravitz was littleknown in the UK; it was the first shoot he had done in the country and I don’t think I’d heard of him before. We met up in Notting Hill, west London, and I shot some black & white images of him in an alley leading off the Portobello Road. The shoot was done quickly on my Hasselblad 500CM with Agfapan 100 APX film.
I remember him being this amazingly handsome guy with great shoulder-length dreadlocks and a beautiful face. His manager came with us on the shoot and they were both really accommodating. Kravitz clearly had the kind of appearance and charisma you need in order to be the frontman of a rock band.
The album he was promoting,
Mama Said, went on to sell over three million copies and included one of his most famous songs, It Ain’t Over ’Till It’s Over. Kravitz had further success in the following years and by the time I photographed him again, in 1998, he was established as an international star and was about to release his fifth album.
This time, the shoot took place in the much more sunny and glamorous surroundings of Compass Point, Nassau, in the Bahamas. I was given the commission by the Observer Life magazine and my pictures would illustrate an interview by the journalist William Leith. Kravitz was shooting a video for one of his forthcoming singles,
I Belong To You, which was being directed by the American photographer, Mark Seliger.
William Leith and I stayed in beachside hotel apartments on stilts and, as there was a lot of waiting around during the video shoot, I spent my free time going snorkelling and eating out in amazing restaurants. It was more like going on holiday than doing a job. Kravitz was staying in the same hotel and one day I saw him coming down to breakfast with a woman so beautiful I still remember her face today.
Seliger was covetous of Kravitz’s time, understandably, as he was doing a video shoot for the record company. Therefore, I had to take whatever opportunities I could get, to shoot the portraits, such as when Kravitz was waiting around between takes.
However, eventually I put my foot down and got some one-on-one time with him on a beach.
I decided it would be good to get some shots of him in the sea and imagined he was the sort of person who would be keen to get in the water. He actually took some persuading, but to his credit he went along with my idea. Getting shots of him without his sunglasses was more difficult. I’d ask him to remove them but they kept finding their way back on.
I got in the sea with him,
‘Interestingly the video includes a very similar shot of him in the sea’
holding my Fuji GW-670 rangefinder and shooting on Kodak Tri-X film. There was little chance of getting the camera soaked because the sea was very calm. In that situation, my first instinct as a photographer was to fill the frame with him. I managed to shoot him with his top off and the most obvious thing to do was to make him look like a statue coming out of the water.
However, the more interesting pictures came when I used a boat on the horizon in the background, as an oblique reference to the film, Dead Calm. The sea was like a surrealist landscape – almost like a stage on which something could happen.
Including the boat in the frame created a sort of narrative, and when only his head was showing it suggested that he could be swimming away from the boat. Kravitz told Mark Seliger about the shoot and interestingly the video for I Belong To You includes a very similar shot of him in the sea, although without the boat.
Taking this picture was an important lesson for me, because although I was sacrificing the chance to include Kravitz’s amazing pectoral muscles, it made a more interesting image. Just showing him as a man up to his neck in the sea wearing sunglasses means there’s some doubt that it even is Lenny Kravitz. By effectively concealing most of the subject and withholding information, the image gives the viewers just a little taste and leaves them wanting more.