Bob Mortimer

Harry Borden looks back on a shoot with the popular comedian, actor and author

- David Clark

Looking back at portrait shoots I did much earlier in my career, it’s interesting to see how my shooting style has changed over the years. Back in 2000, for example, when I photographed Bob Mortimer, I would have taken a range of equipment to the shoot and tried as many different things as possible in the time available.

Over the years I had hit on a way of working that suited the magazines and newspapers that commissioned me. Here I would have been directing Bob’s poses, asking him to stand in a certain way, make an expression or perhaps do particular things, making it up as I went along and trusting my instincts.

It was a kind of creative scattergun approach. The resulting pictures didn’t tell you very much about the subject’s personality and I was less inclined to get amazing authentic moments, but that’s the way things were back then.

In this case, I was photographing Bob for Later magazine, a men’s magazine published by IPC that was aimed at a slightly older audience than Loaded, one of the company’s other publications. My brief was simply to shoot a range of images that would illustrate an interview with him, and one of those images would go on the cover.