Stephen Lovell-Davis

Willem Dafoe - Cannes 1993

I took this in a hotel during the film festival. He had just got off a transatlantic flight and was probably jet-lagged but he was completely involved in the shoot and treated it with great intensity. A real pleasure to photograph.

Keira Knightley - London 2002

When I got this job I didn’t know who she was. A friend told me she was in Bend It Like Beckham, which I hadn’t seen but had heard of, so I was expecting Parminder Nagra. Keira had finished filming Pirates of the Caribbean by then but it hadn’t been released. She came to the shoot with her mum, who was lovely. At one point Keira put her hair up and it emphasised the elegance of her neck, so I asked her to do it again and photographed it. I like the way her fingers look like a hair clip.  

Quentin Tarantino - Cannes 1992

My late friend Ruth Picardie, who I was working with at the film festival, said his film Reservoir Dogs was brilliant and we should interview him. I had never heard of him or the film and assumed it to be about stray animals and water-conservation in LA. I was wrong. 

Harvey Keitel - Cannes 1992 

He was in Cannes promoting Bad Lieutenant and Reservoir Dogs - a bit of a dark year, then. This was taken in a print journalists’ group interview. I was just sitting in with Ruth Picardie, who was part of it. To my surprise, at the end of the session several of the journos got up to get selfies with him on their 35mm snapshot cameras. So I manoeuvred him over to the window and got four frames off before I was asked to leave by his publicist (‘this isn’t a photo call!’). Two of the pictures were OK.  

Sir Ranulph Feinnes - Exmoor 2002

James May and I did a story about him for Land Rover. We didn’t want to enrage the legendarily iron-hard, ex-SAS explorer by being late, so we drove down the night before and stayed in a hotel. When we got to his house, our arrival timed to the minute, it was apparent that he had forgotten we were coming that morning.

Grenville Davey - London 1992

I photographed the Cornish sculptor Grenville Davey for the 1992 Turner Prize, which he went on to win. At the time he wasn’t that keen on all the attention it brought him. This photograph wasn’t ever used but it was one of my favourites from the shoot. I think it shows something of that side to his character. He died at the end of February 2022, aged sixty. Far too young and a tragic loss to his family and friends.

Anish Kapoor - London 1991

He won the Turner Prize in that year. I was living in Camden at the time and went to photograph him in his studio space in Camberwell. As a north Londoner, I thought it was the back end of nowhere…

I’ve lived there for the past thirty years. 

Sam Neill - Cannes 1993

I took this in a corridor of the Carlton Hotel. He was there promoting Jane Campion’s film The Piano. I remember him being interested in my battered old Nikon F, although I shot this on a Pentax 6x7. 

Holly Hunter - Cannes 1993

This was taken during an interview at the Carlton Hotel. I shot it on Polapan, which was an instant 35mm black and white transparency film. You had to have a little machine to develop it and it didn’t always come out perfectly, hence the marks along the bottom left of the frame.

Kathy Acker - Wiltshire 1996

The late Kathy Acker, author of Blood and Guts in High School and other books. This picture was taken in February 1996, before she was diagnosed with the breast cancer that resulted in her double mastectomy. 

Paul Theroux - Charing Cross  station 1992

I shot this picture of travel writer Paul Theroux for the Independent Magazine in 1992 to accompany an article by another great travel writer, William Dalrymple. I didn’t have a lot of time to get the pictures so I marched the poor man down The Strand in the rain to Charing Cross railway station. A bit of a corny travel reference, I know, but I was desperate.

Damien Hirst - Brixton 1992

I took this picture on a wide-angle camera looking downwards with the result that it makes Damien look like a petulant child. Quite appropriate given that he really was the ‘enfant terrible’ of British art at that time. His reputation was so fearsome that I was rather trepidatious of doing the shoot. In fact he was great to work with and we got on really well. For those of you of the 'is that supposed to be art?' persuasion, please note embalmed fish on the left (art) and boot on the right (boot).

Damien Hirst - Brixton 1992

Another one from the same shoot. One of the idiosyncrasies of the Hasselblad SWC, which I took this on, is that you look through a little viewfinder and set the focus by measuring the distance. This can make the composition a bit hit-and-miss (see cropped radio here) but I rather like that about viewfinder cameras. Very different from the total perfection we have come to expect in the digital/Photoshop era.

Bob Mortimer and Vic Reeves (Jim Moir) in a café - Greenwich 1991

I had been to see Vic Reeves Big Night Out at the Albany Empire and thought it was great but they weren't that well known then. By the time I took this they were on television and starting to become famous. I photographed them in several different settings that day but my favourites were these café pictures.

Gordon Jackson - Hampstead 1977

I was sent  by the Hampstead and Highgate Express to photograph him at his home. I knew of him from his role as 'Hudson' in Upstairs, Downstairs and was a little intimidated. But he couldn't have been more easy-going and helpful as a subject, which was a great blessing for a nervous young photographer. This little statue was called Antoninus and there was another romanesque statue in the garden called Colin Welland, after the British actor, which made a better story but not such a good photograph.

Diane Kruger - Fulham 2004

This is a lith print from a colour negative. Lith printing is a strange process in that the print initially develops in this peachy colour and then the darker areas start to show as these dust-like blacks which affect nearby dark areas. It is known as infectious development and you can actually watch the blacks infecting adjacent shadow areas when the print is in the tray.

Barry Sheene - Donington Park 2000

One of the great privileges of being a photographer is that you can end up being paid to meet your heroes. This was one such occasion. For me, as a long-time biker, Barry Sheene was a real hero: World Champion in 1976 and 77, survived two horrific high-speed crashes, had a hole drilled in his helmet chin piece so he could have a last fag on the start line and, of course, that 1979 British Grand Prix race with Kenny Roberts.

I photographed him racing a Fred Walmsley Manx Norton in a classic race at Donington Park in July 2000. He was one of those people who put everyone at ease. While I was photographing him he started chatting to a pretty German woman in the next pit garage. At one point he said something to her in German and she burst out laughing. I said ‘I didn’t know you could speak German’ and his reply was ‘Mate, I can get my face slapped in a dozen different languages’.

I sent him some prints of him and his son Freddy from that day and a couple of weeks later I was on the Ardnamurchan peninsula, in the west coast of Scotland, when my mobile rang. I answered it and a voice on the other end said 'Hello Steve, it’s Barry Sheene here in Australia, thanks for the pictures'. Standing on a hillside in a remote part of Scotland, talking to one of my heroes on the other side of the world was one of the more surreal moments of my life. He died less than three years later of cancer, which seemed so terrible after all the near-death experiences he had managed to survive.