Over the course of a 30 year career as one of the UK’s most prominent and prolific portrait photographers, Harry Borden has photographed absolutely everybody.

He started out shooting bands and musicians for the New Musical Express, where he quickly made a name for himself, before then establishing himself as a regular contributor to the Observer Newspaper and its magazine. It wasn’t long before he would cement his burgeoning reputation by winning second prize in the portrait category of the World Press Photo awards on two consecutive years, at a stage in his career where he barely knew what the World Press Photo awards were.

Since then his work has featured in the weekend magazines of just about every national newspaper in Britain as well as many of the world’s most high profile publications.

Harry has more photographs in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery than an other photographer of his generation and in 2014 he was awarded an honorary fellowship of the royal photographic society.

As well as his editorial and commercial work he has also produced a number of personal projects, the latest of which is a portrait series of holocaust survivors which will be published in 2017 by Octopus. He talks a little about the project in part 2, which will be next week. 

It was a real pleasure to talk to Harry. He is an absolute gentleman and the reason this is a two-parter is that we chatted for well over two hours and I think we could’ve gone on all day. When I came to listen to the interview, I realised I couldn’t possibly edit it down to a listener-friendly hour or so, because I wanted to use nearly all of it. So, rather than put out one stupidly long episode, I thought I would run it over two weeks, and that’s what I’m doing.

Here’s part one and at the beginning of the conversation we were talking about a shoot Harry had recently done with the dancer, Darcy Bussell…

In episode 015 Harry Discusses:

• Living the life he wants to lead

• His approach to doing shoots

• Being amateurish

• Photographer etiquette

• The early years and not having a clue

• Trusting your instincts and not over-thinking it

• Writing a car off

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