Profile: Hamish Brown
WORDS Ian Farrell PICTURES Hamish Brown
For someone who shoots for The Sunday Times, The Observer and GQ, and has prints in the National Gallery, Hamish Brown is a very modest character. Nevertheless we were keen to know the secret of his success, and what he thinks of portrait photography today
Hamish Brown has to be one of the most relaxed, down to earth photographers I’ve met in all my years as a photographic industry journalist. As we chat over a coffee in an East London bar about his life shooting sportsmen and women, musicians and celebrities, I cannot think of a single reason why any one of his subjects would ever take a dislike to him. Maybe that is the secret of his success as a portrait photographer?
Ian Farrell: Are you happy being described as a portrait photographer?
Hamish Brown: Yes – I always have been. I like to steer clear of fashion – although I think you could argue that some of my advertising images have a fashion-like feel to them – but generally I’m happy taking photographs as long as there are people in them. I think I do my best when I can get a bit more involved personally with the subject though. I mean I could go and take a picture of a chef and it would be good, but I’m not that into chefs or cooking. I’d much prefer to go and shoot someone who is a professional sportsman, or in a band. Those are two things that I am passionate about: sport and music.
Although there isn’t quite so much at stake, I think successful photographers have a lot in common with successful sportsmen. They need to be focused and determined, and there are equivalents of Olympic gold medals for photographers. I think you need to be focused on your performance in the same way a runner or a footballer might be. You need to ensure that, on a bad day, the worst you come away with is a really good set of professional pictures. On a good day you might shoot the best photographs of your career. What you can’t do is come away with unusable material and start blaming your equipment, or something. That is unacceptable.
When did you learn photography? Where you an early starter?
I learned photography from my Dad, who was a serious enthusiast photographer. He had a darkroom with a gnome enlarger and everything. At the age of seven I’d be in there processing film and making prints with him. It was a weird time to be on such a learning curve. I knew what phrases like f/2 and f/16 actually meant, and what they did, but I never questioned why they did it.
I dipped in and out of college a couple of times doing photography, but, for me, personally it didn’t work. I didn’t really want to understand things from a mathematical or theoretical point of view, I just wanted to get on with things and take pictures. I didn’t want to know the logarithm you need to know to work out an aperture, but I did know the depth-of-field I’m likely to get at f/2.8 is less than I’d get at f/16. I knew that from that early age.
Were sport and music the first subjects you shot when you were starting out?
Music was, yes. I began photographing my mates who were in bands – really small bands. I used to say to them to just pay my expenses, and then if they liked my pictures they could pay me a fee. If they didn’t like them, they didn’t have to pay me anything. I would shoot two rolls of 35mm film, and do about five set-ups with that. Looking back, shooting that few frames was good discipline; different from blasting away with digital nowadays. If they liked the prints I gave them they’d give me a couple of hundred quid.
Eventually some of the bands I was shooting started going places – the Chemical Brothers for instance. Eventually I started assisting a guy for a bit, and I was shooting gig photos for NME. I didn’t really want to shoot gigs, but that was my route into doing portrait work – and it paid off. I started getting more serious stuff, and shooting covers. In all I worked there for about five years.
I moved on to sport and celebrity work, but that time spent shooting from NME taught me how to work quickly – a valuable skill.
How do you interact with your subjects? Do you try to relax them?
To be honest, I don’t do anything premeditated. For advertising jobs I have a specific aim that you have to achieve, usually in conjunction with an art director or something, but with editorial work I tend to turn up and just go with the flow. If I turn up with a specific concept in my mind of what I want to do, and my subject doesn’t want to do that, then I’m in trouble. It’s important to be flexible. I don’t want to end up with a set of pictures of someone looking awkward. I just want people to be relaxed in my shoots.
Actually, maybe I take it too easy [laughs]. People tend to leave my photo shoots saying ‘thank you for making that so easy’, and I’m thinking ‘well I didn’t try and make it easy, I just tried to do it well.’ If I spend half an hour twisting their limbs around to get them in a specific position then at the end of it their faces are going to tell me that they are bored, uncomfortable and they want to go home. 
Are you shooting entirely digitally now?
I’ve been fighting the corner for film right up until now, but I finally feel like I’m caving in. When 35mm digital came along it was easy – in so many ways it was better than film, so I’ve used it extensively – a Canon EOS-1Ds MkII and III and an EOS 5D. But medium-format and large-format film still rules, really.
Sometimes I think that digital photography has actually led to a decline in picture quality, but then maybe that’s not such a massive problem. You see pictures in magazines all the time with blown-out highlights, where there is just blank white page, and who does that annoy? Me? Definitely. Other photographers? Probably. The magazine buying public? I doubt it very much. That’s where I sometimes feel like I’m straining, as a photographer, to keep the quality end of things going. With all due respect to people buying magazines, they think it’s just a picture, and don’t notice these things. But when I see highlights that are burned out, I think ‘well, that’s just not very good.’
I’m glad I had that film background. If you are 15 or 16 and are aspiring to be a photographer, you wouldn’t get that now, which is a shame.
Obviously, photography is becoming a very different medium, and we all have to embrace the change and move on. Clients want digital nowadays, so that’s what we have to deliver – although sometimes I’m sure they don’t know why they want digital. They might say ‘because it’s quicker, isn’t it?’ and I think ‘well no, not necessarily’. Especially if I have 20GB of Raw files to go through. People shoot a lot more with a digital camera. On medium format I might come away with four or five rolls of film, but with digital there is always a danger you’ll get carried away and shoot far too much. Now I get my digital operator to tell me when I hit 40 frames. I shoot a few more and stop there. Otherwise I’d stand there pressing the shutter release all day and going nowhere.
I actually still get a few clients requesting that I use film – Virgin records did not so long ago, because they like what I get shooting that way.
What about retouching? Do you get more involved with that since you’ve started to capture more digitally?
No, I’m not a retoucher and I don’t pretend to be. Generally I’m happy using other people who are specialists. In the days of film I used to do my own printing until I figured out there were plenty of other people who could do it a lot better than I could. It’s like that with retouching. I’m a photographer, not a digital operator or a graphic artist. I think a lot of photographers think that they are retouchers, and I personally think they can’t do it properly.
You have prints in the National Gallery now too. That’s quite an honour!
Well, I’m quite a fan of the National Portrait Gallery, and yes I have got a couple of prints in the permanent collection, although that might mean they are downstairs in a dusty box for all I know!
I think places like that are very important for the preservation of culture in this country. A few years ago now, my mum took me to a Richard Avedon show at the NPG – Evidence, I think it was called. It was just so inspiring, walking round seeing all of those great pictures. Since then, Avedon has been quite an inspiration. I wouldn’t say my photography is based on his, but I just found his images really inspirational when I was starting out.
I remember going to a lecture he gave at the National Film Theatre once: it was the most inspirational three hours of my life. It really switched me on to things. It was an epiphany.
What do you think the future holds for you?
When I started out all those years ago, and I shot the Chemical Brothers, I had no idea I would end up working for the NME, and I would shoot Robbie Williams for eight years, or shoot a book on Luis Figo, who is my absolute hero. So I am quite happy saying that I don’t really know what I’ll be doing in the coming years. And to be honest, that’s great. If I said to you ‘in three years time I want to go and spend a year with the president of the US’, then I already know what’s coming. There’s no surprise.
I think there are a few places I know I don’t want to be. No disrespect to wedding photographers – as I think it’s the hardest job in the world – but I couldn’t do that every weekend. I really take my hats off to people like that, but just find weddings a scary prospect. I shot one for a mate once, but he and his fiancé were getting hitched in Malibu and they just wanted some portraits of them together sitting on a rock on a beach. It took 10 minutes and I was done. That’s about my limit.
There are people I’d like to get closer to, and photograph. I have a lot of respect for Tiger Woods, and we never really see much about him except his life on a golf course, so that would be nice.
I take pictures, and I’ll be happy to keep dong that. I directed a video the other year, and it was good fun, but I don’t want to keep doing it. I’m a photographer. I take still pictures of people, and I love that. I want to still be doing it when I’m 75, that’d make me very happy.
• For more of Hamish Brown’s work visit his website at www.hamishbrown.com or www.bluntlondon.com
