Here's Mario Testino in the arts pages of The Times. But is the world's
highest-paid fashion photographer an artist? “Of course! How can you not be
when you have to come up with ideas every day?” says Testino through thick
Latin vowels, a little umbraged and still languid from a flight from the
States, where he's wrapped up a lucrative Michael Corrs advertising
campaign, a photo story for American Vogue and something edgier in a
magazine called V where he most recently shot the supermodel Stephanie
Seymour sitting on the lavatory but made her look better than normal people
will ever hope to look in their lives. Commerce, he says, excites him - but
so what? “Fine artists sell their pieces for £1 million so they're also
commercial. I think you can use your art to create desire and sell.”
Even peeing can be aspirational if Testino is at the other end of the camera
and top models, pop singers, royalty and actresses trust him to create that
“brave” new look crucial to any beautiful woman's long-term survival in the
public eye. It was at his suggestion that Diana, Princess of Wales, had her
hair straightened for those seminal pictures; that the model Agness Deyn
peroxided and chopped hers off (Testino denies having dumped her from the
Burberry campaign: “It wasn't a vendetta or cancelling or killing! I use
people then I don't use them then I bring them back”); and that Claudia
Schiffer stripped off - for the first time - for the cover of German Vogue's
“sex” issue, which Testino guest-edited.
Testino, who says he is repelled by ugliness, is the king of rehabilitating
career makeovers. He started off shooting models but has branched out to
shooting “real people and [trying] to make them look like models”.
He is just back from New York and on his way to a holiday in Ibiza - a brief
chink in a self-imposed schedule where sleep is snatched on trans-Atlantic
flights (“A glass of red wine and I'm out”). Weekends are non-existent. He
has a boyfriend but nowhere he calls home: “I don't really live anywhere.”
Where, then, does he put his stuff? “It's a good question this, because my
stuff has become nothing! My stuff is my Acne jeans, some Dior sneakers and
some shoes and navy blue socks, navy blue shirts from Versace, navy blue
jumpers from Prada. And my jacket.”
This is a preppy get-up that reflects not just the expensive lifestyle that he
promotes in his photographs but his conservative nature. He abhors vulgarity
and has no time for people he considers to be second-rate: “I've never
understood Heidi Klum's success. I've never worked with her. What has she
got? She's blonde. What else?”
He refused to play himself in the Sex and the City film because it would have
been naff, he says. He's never watched the show.
His London studio is undergoing a revamp, so instead we are upstairs in a
private members' bar in Notting Hill.Testino looks healthy at 53, a little
jowly, tall, debonair, steely - which is surprising given how the internet
is peppered with photographs of him grinning broadly at parties with his arm
around just about anyone. He can be trivial but he is not camp and, as
anybody who has ever been photographed by him will tell you, “disarmingly
open”. On the subject of his mother: “I'm very lucky, because she has never
cared about the sexual preference of her children.” Raised a Roman Catholic,
“I am not a believer in what the Church preaches. I don't go to Mass or
anything. But I have a belief. Because most people I know who don't believe,
whenever there's a real problem they all of a sudden believe. And I am wary
of that, saying, ‘I don't believe', and the aircraft is falling and I'm
like, ‘Oh God, please save me'.”
After hundreds of Vanity Fair goddesses, umpteen Versace campaigns, the cover
of Madonna's Ray of Light album, most of the time what Testino attempts he
succeeds in. There is, however, one notable exception: Margaret Thatcher,
whom he photographed for British Vogue's July issue and who seems to have
been transformed by his lens into a snarling Tussaud's exhibit, her wrinkles
smoothed by post-production chicanery.
Testino says: “I think it was a successful picture in that it was a document
and it was a moment of history. I don't think it was a successful picture in
the same way as the Diana pictures, where I managed to bring out something
in [Diana] that we hadn't seen.”
Thatcher's age made things difficult, he says, because 82-year-olds tend to be
immune to self-reinvention. But one suspects that Testino's rampant visual
optimism didn't sit so well with his subject matter. “Avedon was a fabulous
photographer for catching an off moment,” he says. “They didn't necessarily
look beautiful, they might look melancholic or they might look scared.”
Testino, by contrast, simply wants “to make people look good”.
When Testino first came to London from his native Peru in the late 1970s, he
was “a bit of a pest” in the eyes of the Vogue fashionistas, who would refer
to him as “that man from South America” who hung about their offices.
Testino had fled degrees in economics, law and international relations,
which he found boring. A glum job as a waiter taught him some lessons about
human psychology. “It was interesting being looked down on,” he says. “The
tackiest people always treat other people badly.”
He says that his family is middle-class but this seems like an understatement
when he reveals that his father liked to fly the family (Testino has five
siblings) to New York in business class. As a young man, Testino knew that
“I needed and wanted to earn a living. I didn't want to wait for an hour for
a bus after leaving a nightclub - I wanted a taxi”.
His heart was set on fashion photography but “I realised that all the fashion
photographers in London had to do a lot of mixed jobs - they could get a
Vogue assignment but they also had to do the Littlewoods catalogue and that
wasn't what I wanted to do.”
Persistence, happenstance, charm and talent combined to set him on the right
path. He met and photographed Lucinda Chambers, now the fashion director of
British Vogue, before either of them had jobs and knew Carine Roitfeld long
before she became editor of French Vogue. In the 1980s he was still under
Vogue's radar, shooting bizarre photographs for Harpers & Queen (like
the pop music videos of the time they contained strong, often irrelevant,
narratives). It was the 1990s before he hit his stride thanks to
collaborations with Tom Ford and Roitfeld. His success, he says, liberated
him to be more experimental - the Gucci campaign in which Carmen Kass had a
G shaved into her pubic hair was Testino's.
But is he an artist? His private art collection is coveted by Charles Saatchi.
But although the art crowd is happy for him to turn up at their parties,
they're less happy counting him as one of their own. One art-world insider
described Testino to me as a celebrity portraitist who “takes pictures of
pretty girls”. Perhaps this is connected to Testino's conservatism and his
allergy to ugliness.
“I don't like a tormented photograph,” he says, adding that his photographs
are not shallow, but subtly draw the viewer in. “Something attracts you in
them but the attraction isn't because she has a pot on her head or tonnes of
make-up and weird clothes and weird everything.”
He is irked by the notion that his charm makes his photographs: “Many people
when I started didn't believe I was a good fashion photographer and probably
they still think that. A lot of fashion photographers will do the same sort
of image for many years; it's easier to be successful if you do that. If you
want to do movement, colour, black and white, men, women, studio outdoors,
daylight, no light, flash - that's me.”
His photographs promote conspicuous consumption, he works for big
conglomerates and he doesn't want to give up work because it would mean an
end to his glamorous lifestyle. He's an admirer of Thatcher: “I don't know
whether everything she did was right but I think she helped the country as
such.”
Any other politicians he wants to photograph? “No, not really, because they
come and go.” But so do models. “Yes, I know, but they're beautiful, they
have to come and go. They're only perfect for a certain time in their lives.”
If they're lucky Testino's magic camera will intervene.
Mario Testino: Obsessed By You is at Phillips de Pury, Howick Place, London
SW1, July 3-26 (www.phillipsdepury.com; 020-7318 4010)
Testino's most famous subjects
Margaret Thatcher (2008). Testino photographed the former Prime Minister, aged
82, in her trademark royal blue for July's Vogue (above)
Diana, Princess of Wales (1997). Testino last photographed Diana for Vanity
Fair magazine five months before her death
Gisele Bündchen (2008). Credited with discovering the Brazilian
supermodel, Testino caused a stir in April when he photographed her in a
tiny, very revealing, pair of shredded shorts
Gwyneth Paltrow. Testino has done many studies of Paltrow, one of which she
said was her father's favourite picture of her
Kate Moss. Testino has worked with Moss since she was a teenager, from a
Mohican-sporting shot for The Face in 1996, to a straight-on close up of her
in face paint in 2002
Madonna. Another of Testino's frequent subjects, Madonna was notably shot by
him for her album cover, Ray of Light
Robbie Williams (2002). The pop star was photographed peeking out from behind
a sequined Union Jack thong
