Getting Away With It

In celebration of what would have been Patrick Lichfield's 87th birthday, I'd like to share a piece

I had published in April 1999. I hope you enjoy.

In his own words, Patrick Lichfield has been “getting away with it” for 37 years. As he gets ready to celebrate his 60th birthday in April, Practical Photography discovers that he’s still as outspoken as ever.

Interview: David Corfield

“We’re on the edge of a whole new era,” Patrick Lichfield reflects. “So I’m rather glad I’ve reached this stage in my career.”

“The digital thing is wonderful. It will improve good pictures, but it will also rescue bad ones, which leaves me a bit uneasy.”

With the arrival of the digital age, Lichfield’s happy to have reached 60. While mourning the passing of traditional skills, he has more than a few well-chosen words about the future.

“From 1826 to about now, photography has always been a silver emulsion on a gelatine or a glass backing. It has a finite life and needs darkroom chemicals to create a picture. We’re looking now at a whole new world about to happen. The chemicals are drying up.”

Lichfield is luddite and proud of it. He’s an old dog and won’t be taught any new tricks. He’s had a play with a digital camera and occasionally uses one for snaps in the studio, but it will replace his Rolleiflex medium-format or his Olympus 35mm? Not on your nelly.

“I have never had any digital retouching done to any of my pictures. And I’m quite proud of that.”

“Digital cameras will change the way we look at photographs. They will become operators. They will be less creative. The creation will take place behind the scenes with art directors and designers.”

“I feel that I’ve learnt an awful lot of stuff in my career, and that technical knowledge is something some young photographers today don’t have. You need to know what goes into creating a picture, it’s not just pressing a button, you know.”

“It’s easy now to pick up a camera and say ‘I am a photographer’ because the camera does such an awful lot for you. The technical side of things has really suffered because of that. Pictures will all be sharp and well-exposed because the camera will have done it.”

Lichfield is refreshingly honest in his opinions. Once a regular on TV chat shows and quiz games, people liked him because he was articulate and looked every part the glamorous playboy. Few realised how serious he was about photography.

He was a cousin of the Queen, a Lord playing at being a glamorous snapper. You’d see his face on Call My Bluff more than you’d see his work in Vogue. And that was always his problem. Famous for being famous? Lichfield hadn’t banked on that one.

“I became pigeonholed,” he explains. “I did 17 years of the Unipart calendars, before that was the Burberry’s fashion stuff, and more recently the royal wedding pictures of Charles and Diana. Every time I did a lot of anything people would say that’s all I was famous for.”

But it didn’t stop there. Lichfield advertised cameras, he had shares in restaurants, he even launched the Range Rover car in America.

“There comes a time when too much publicity becomes a bad thing,” he reflects. “I don’t know why it all happened the way it did, but I felt uncomfortable about being so well known. I felt that I wasn’t being taken seriously.”

“So I went to ground, and I’ve been working away doing all sorts of interesting jobs. Jewellery, beauty, portraits, carpets…” Carpets? Oh yes, Lichfield photographs anything. Even shagpiles and Axminster. He’s keen to point out that he’s a jobbing photographer, just like the rest. He gets involved with every stage of photography, from lugging lights into his Range Rover to pressing the flesh with the client afterwards.

The more Lichfield talks, the more passionate he becomes. He opens up and becomes increasingly animated. His hands start gesticulating while his glasses fall off his nose and dangle from the cord around his neck.

“I’ve just taken a portrait in the studio which required a white background. Now, that background didn’t have to be any old white. It had to be printer’s white. There is a difference, you see.”

“It’s up to me to use my skills when lighting to ensure that the white is the required white.”

“But it’s easy now with digital manipulation,” he frowns. “You could shoot the person in the street and put the background in later. It’s that easy, which is terribly sad. People forget how difficult it used to be.”

“I started taking photographs on October 14th, 1962, at 2:30pm. That was the moment I left the army. I used to be in the Grenadier Guards but after seven years I’d had enough. I burnt my bridges. I wanted to take pictures professionally and to earn my crust from it.”

He hands me a dusty old ledger. “Here, take this,” he says. “I’ve been looking back at my old records.” Inside is a handwritten entry of every job.

“The first ever job was number 10. To be honest I looked much better than 001,” he confesses.

“I’ve kept a note of just about everything I’ve ever done. That’s the one thing the army taught me. Discipline. Have a look at that will you.”

I turn around and examine a row of framed photographs of old wall planners. Just about every month of every year has a big red line going through it.

“That line means I wasn’t in this country,” Lichfield declares. “The pins on that map of the world over there meant that I’ve visited that place.” Europe is completely covered. The Far East is dotted with them, as is most of America. There’s only one placed on top of Los Angeles. I ask him why.

“I must have been to LA 200 times. Bailey and I once worked out that we’ve been around the world ten times at least.”

Aah, David Bailey. Lichfield sprinkles in the names of other famous photographers during the conversation: Norman Parkinson, Terence Donovan, Don McCullin, Terry O’Neill. On his desk is a fading passport strip of Messrs Donovan, Bailey, McCullin and Lichfield gooning it up behind the curtain. ‘Photokina, 1982’ is the title.

“Photographers now are so much more pampered than they were back in the ’60s and ’70s. I’m not like some photographers who demand a limo wherever I go. I’m a lot more easy going. And I think photographers of my generation are like that. They are more in touch with taking pictures and the joy of creating an image.”

“It gives me enormous pleasure to look at something and know that the client has been pleased with it. What keeps me going is what started me off, and that’s a love of capturing images. I find it deeply satisfying to come out with the image which expresses what I want.”

The single defining characteristic of Lichfield’s work is people. He’ll take a picture of anything provided there’s a person in the scene. His style of photography is relaxed, classical and poised. Dare I say it, almost regal. Surprising then, that Unipart deemed him the ideal man when it came to shooting girls for the workshop wall. Surely a job not fit for an earl?”

“When I started, the calendars were pretty graphic close-ups of girls, almost gynaecological,” he recalls. “I was the first photographer to take a step back, and in doing so I gave the photographs more atmosphere. I showed more of the scene around the model.”

“The shoots themselves were huge productions. I loved working with all those people, and it was such a change to what I’d been used to, working as a stringer on the Daily Mirror.”

“Back then I was a one-man band. Once I’d taken the picture there was bugger all I could do about it.”

“If I didn’t have the shot the editor wanted, I was in trouble. I used to envy all you lot,” he points his finger at me, “because you could just draw a line through words and start all over again.”

“When I first worked for Vogue under its editor of the time, Diana Vreeland, I was allowed to process my films only in New York, London, Paris or Rome. Wherever there was a Vogue office in fact.

“So if I was in Hong Kong, I instantly had to wait until I got home to see what I shot. That’s why Polaroid was so damned useful. It saved my bacon.”

Lichfield’s possibly the biggest collector of Polaroids in the world. They’re downstairs in the model’s dressing rooms. He looks back at them like old friends. Which they probably are.

“I do miss the ’60s,” he admits. “It was a terribly destructive era but a tremendously exciting one. You had to push, push, push to get your feet in the door.”

“One of the problems of being high profile is that people think you’re unapproachable. They think you’re too expensive.”

“Just the other day my secretary took a call from someone desperately in need of a photographer. She said to the caller: ‘Look, Patrick will do the job for you, he’s upstairs now,’ and they were horrified. They couldn’t believe it. I am actually the going rate, you see. I’m no more expensive than David Bailey or Clive Arrowsmith.”

“I see myself as someone who’s not tottering off into the sunset. Far from it. Alright, I can afford to choose the work I do now, but I still like to get my hands dirty. I like pleasing people.”

“I spend a lot of time on lighting as I feel it’s a photographer’s hallmark. It’s an art in itself. I interviewed Terry O’Neill once on Radio Two and I asked him about good lighting.”

“It’s all to do with the rapport between you and the subject,” he replied. “He told me that you decide how you’re going to light someone when you’ve decided how you feel about them. Well I couldn’t fault him on that.”

“I love daylight. The carpet shots I took the other day upstairs in Paddington station were shot on tungsten-balanced film and filtered for daylight. I couldn’t use daylight, so I had a whole bank of photoflood generators all the way down the Euston Road with light shining in to create the effect.”

“Of course, I didn’t have such luxuries back in the ’60s. I couldn’t afford it. I used to work a lot with available light and wide apertures.”

“There’s a shot in my book Retrospect of Charlie Chaplin talking to Marlon Brando. I did that with no help from flash, autofocus or anything. It’s circumstances like that which shape you as a photographer.”

But Lichfield has another passion. “If I wasn’t a photographer,” he tells me, “I’d probably be planting trees at Shugborough, my family home. I love trees.”

Lichfield reaches for a book on the subject and leafs enthusiastically through it (pun intended). “I was up there last night,” he says, “as the sun was going down with my wellingtons on planting a row of oaks.”

“Yes, that’s what I’d be,” he smiles. “A forester. That would do nicely.”

“But it’s not that I regret a moment of being a photographer,” he stresses, ruffling his hair. “You see, I’ve always worked alongside photographers that are slightly better than me. They’ve made me work far harder technically so that I keep on top of the game.”

“To be quite honest, I’m amazed I’ve got away with it for so long.”