Since I began photographing high-profile people in the 1990s, Nigella Lawson has been one of my most frequent subjects; I’ve photographed her a total of eight times. For several years our paths just kept crossing in a series of editorial shoots and commercial ones for clients such as Waterstones and Wedgwood pottery.
She was already a household name when I first worked with her, back in 2000. The daughter of former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson, she had made the leap from journalist to bestselling author of cookery books in 1998, then a year later to hosting her own television series, Nigella Bites.
- Update: Nigella Lawson has now been confirmed as the new judge on The Great British Bake Off, source.
TV series
I’d actually photographed her first husband, the journalist and broadcaster John Diamond, several months before her. They lived in a house on London’s Goldhawk Road, in which they had created a huge kitchen for filming Nigella’s TV series. It was a good location to shoot, with loads of daylight, and I ended up regularly going to the house. I found John, who was terminally ill, the more engaging and warmer of the two; Nigella was beautiful and easy to photograph, but also quite distant.
I photographed her four times in 2000 and the most memorable of them was for an article about her in Scotland on Sunday. I went along to the Bush Bar & Grill in west London, where she was holding a launch party for her latest book. While it was going on, I set up a white backdrop in the middle of the venue. The PR people thought I was being presumptuous, but I’d photographed her only a month or so previously and we had a good rapport so I knew she wouldn’t mind.
She sashayed towards me
She was wearing a long black dress and looked very striking. Everyone was surrounding her and she was signing books. Then she saw the white backdrop and sashayed towards me. She looked me up and down and said, ‘You get around.’ It was a bit like a Mae West line from a movie and I could feel myself blushing. Her looks and natural self-confidence could be intimidating.
I shot her with my Pentax 67 II camera and colour film. There wasn’t the space to set up lights so I used a ringflash. I used it attached to the camera for a shadow-free background and used it to one side of the camera or below it to achieve a variety of lighting effects in a short time-frame. The black dress and the white background gave the images a stark appearance. Looking at the pictures now, it’s odd to think they weren’t taken in a studio, but in the middle of a bar where people were chatting and eating canapes.
Successful books
I photographed Nigella several times in the following years, including once for the cover of Life magazine – the only time I’ve ever shot a Life cover. My most recent shoot with her was in 2009, at the house she shared with her second husband, the businessman and art collector Charles Saatchi. I’d been commissioned to photograph her by the Observer Food Monthly magazine. By then, she was 49 and had produced a number of successful books and TV series.
Beyond the ephemeral
The house was a large mansion in Victoria, central London. Although I was mainly there to photograph Nigella with her mentor, the food writer Anna Del Conte, I also took the opportunity to look beyond the ephemeral concerns of the magazine and get some more portraits of Nigella on her own, which were more saleable.
I photographed her using my Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II and soft natural light. At the entrance to the house there were huge black iron gates and translucent frosted glass and dim light was bleeding through. I liked this location so I shot her there, with the camera on a tripod due to the low light and slow shutter speeds, and it worked well.
Enigmatic
She was wearing a black dress and vivid red lipstick. There was a dark atmosphere to those pictures and she looked pale and almost vampiric. We now know that her marriage to Saatchi was troubled, and looking back at what I shot on the day, she certainly seemed more sombre and less playful. The iron gates made me think of the phrase, ‘a beautiful bird trapped in a gilded cage.’
The person I’ve photographed the most, over the years, is Jamie Oliver. We keep in touch and I regard him as a friend. But despite the fact that I’ve often worked with Nigella and have found her very photogenic and pleasant, I don’t really have any idea who she is. She’s charming and attractive, but at the same time quite enigmatic and unknowable, and I think this combination of qualities is part of the reason for her enduring popularity.
[As told to David Clark]
Harry Borden
Harry Borden is one of the UK’s finest portrait photographers. He has won prizes at the World Press Photo awards (1997 and 1999) and in 2014 he was awarded an Honorary Fellowship by the Royal Photographic Society. The National Portrait Gallery collection holds more than 100 of his images. His book of portraits of lone fathers, Single Dad, was published in 2021. Harry is also a speaker at AP’s upcoming Festival of Photography.
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