Mario Testino

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 23 October 2005

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway is one of the world's most successful fashion photographers, Mario Testino.

Kate Moss, Catherine Zeta Jones and Madonna are among the women who have posed for him and, most famously, he became Princess Diana's favourite photographer. But his route into photography was circuitous. He began studying law and then economics in his native Peru but finished neither course. He had a short spell in America before arriving in London and he says he immediately loved it here. But the early years were tough; he struggled to convince anyone at the glossy magazines to look at his work. Half the trouble, he says, was that he was ringing people from call boxes - and they would hang up before he'd had time to put in any money. But years of building contacts within the industry - and building trust among his models - have paid off and he is now as much as a celebrity as the women he photographs. His most famous pictures are those he took of Princess Diana looking confident, relaxed and happy, just months before she died. They have now been reprinted for a two-year long exhibition and he says that when he saw them again in the lab, it brought "a knot in his throat". Mario Testino's photographs of Diana, Princess of Wales, are being exhibited in the State Apartments at Kensington Palace from 24 November 2005.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Fina Estampa by Caetano Veloso Book: Demian by Hermann Hesse Luxury: Own pillow

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2005, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a photographer born and brought in Peru, he first came to London in his early
0:34.6	20s and having tried his hand as a waiter, decided to become a photographer instead.
0:39.9	He set about making himself known in an uncompromising way. He simply rang up editors of glossy
0:45.3	magazines and harangued them. Bit by bit his client-based grew. Fifteen years later, it exploded
0:52.0	into something huge.
0:53.4	Harper's Bazaar had chosen him to photograph their top models,
0:56.8	then Madonna asked him to do a Vessarchi shoot with her,
1:00.0	and after that Diana Princess of Wales asked him to take some pictures of her.
1:04.4	In all of these and in the many other pictures he's taken his unmistakable style shows
1:10.3	through. He makes his subjects feel great, so they look great. Happy women, full of life,
1:16.9	whatever the rest of the world is saying about them. A few years ago, the National Portrait
1:21.2	Gallery mounted a major retrospective of his work, but he says he doesn't pretend to be an artist.
1:27.0	Commercial photographers are salesman, he insists.
1:30.0	My job is to sell clothes. He is Mario Testino.
1:34.4	It's a little more than that though, isn't it, Mario. I mean you sell people as well.
1:38.0	Well, it's a little bit, I get often criticized for saying that I'm not an artist because people say that I undermine the work of a
1:44.7	fashion photographer us in general, not just my own. But I think we are really a mixture of things.
1:49.9	For me, a fine artist is somebody that doesn't have any limitations, no constraints, whilst me as a fashion
1:55.0	as a fashion photographer, I always have to be limited
1:57.0	what maybe my client wants or the muzzle they want
	...

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