Helen Bartlett

The leading family photographer discusses her long-term love of black and white photography with Niall Hampton

- Niall Hampton

Having taken up photography at the age of eight after being given a Zorki rangefinder [a Soviet-made copy of a Leica] for Christmas, Helen Bartlett started earning an income from photography when she was a teenager.

Her mother ran a nursery school in the basement of the family home and, as a summer job, Bartlett would take photos of the children. Selling their parents handmade black and white prints gave her an early taste of creating and selling photographs, so after studying history at university, she decided to make photography her career. Since then, Bartlett has gone on to become a leading family photographer. Shooting exclusively in black and white, she specialises in documenting the essence of childhood, capturing tender scenes created to resonate with her clients. Intrigued by Bartlett's aesthetic, we asked her about her commitment to black and white...

Did you adopt black and white as your signature look because you started out in black and white, or is there just something about it that you feel works better than colour?

We had a colour darkroom at home when I was growing up, so I had experience of working with colour, but it never resonated with me. I fell in love with monochrome because the pictures my dad took of my brothers and I were in black and white. I knew they looked good when I was young, they looked good when I was a teenager and they look good today. Some of them are still on the wall with pictures I'm taking now of my nephews and nieces, as well as ones of my parents taken in the 1950s when they were children. These photographs all hang together well; monochrome is timeless.