Celebrity Portraits

Jared Harris in The Wall Street Journal

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Jared Harris in The Wall Street Journal

Last week The Wall Street Journal published Marc Myers' House Call interview with Jared Harris, and the portrait that opens the piece is one of mine.

The sitting took place at my London studio. Harris was filming at the time, and he set the production aside for a day so that he could sit. That is not a small thing. A filming day is an expensive, jealously guarded commodity, and an actor who gives one up for a portrait is telling you something about the seriousness with which he regards the record of his own face.

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Photographing the cover of Things I Took from the Dark

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Photographing the cover of Things I Took from the Dark

Last October — a full year before the book would reach the shelves — he came to my Farringdon studio to sit for the cover of Things I Took from the Dark: The Museum of Me, his illustrated memoir, published by Quercus on 8 October. For thirty years — from The League of Gentlemen through Psychoville to Inside No. 9, which brought him and Steve Pemberton a BAFTA for its final series — Shearsmith has been British television's most reliable custodian of the uncanny. The book explains why.

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A Privilege — Babs Olusanmokun in London

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A Privilege — Babs Olusanmokun in London

I had the privilege this week of photographing Babs Olusanmokun in my London studio, and as I worked I found myself thinking, not for the first time, about how often I get to say that word — privilege — about the Black actors who find their way to my chair.

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The Singer's Silence — Nick Pritchard at the Los Angeles Studio

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The Singer's Silence — Nick Pritchard at the Los Angeles Studio

There is a particular quiet that settles over a portrait sitting when the subject is, by trade, a maker of sound. The performer who fills a room — who has stood in front of seventeen thousand people at the Coca-Cola Arena and held them — arrives in my studio and discovers that the only instrument I am asking him to play is his own stillness. Nick Pritchard understood this faster than most.

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Five Years Late: Portraits of Babs Olusanmokun

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Five Years Late: Portraits of Babs Olusanmokun

Portraits of Babs Olusanmokun, London | Rory Lewis

Portrait photographer Rory Lewis on capturing actor Babs Olusanmokun (Dune, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds) at his London studio — five years in the making.

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