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Harry Borden
Harry is one of the
UK’s finest portrait
photographers and
his work has been
widely published.
He has won prizes
at the World Press
Photo awards
(1997 and 1999), and was awarded an
Honorary Fellowship by the RPS in 2014.
The National Portrait Gallery collection
holds more than 100 of his images.
Visit http://www.harryborden.co.ukoilskin 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
obeat 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