One wouldn’t immediately equate the life of an interiors photographer with the Sex Pistols, but in the case of Henry Bourne it kind of makes sense. Back in 2002, Bourne, having just stepped away from the altar with his new bride, designer Harriet Anstruther, was toasted by his best man, fellow photographer (and Vogue contributor) Andrew Lamb. Lamb, trying to describe his friend in one simple tag-line, dubbed him ‘anarchy in the Ivy’.
Although Bourne was no Sid Vicious or Johnny Rotten, what Lamb was referring to was Bourne’s innate facility to shift from one milieu to another. He could spend the day hanging out with and photographing artists in a London squat and then join friends for dinner at a swanky restaurant, without blinking an eye. Moreover, Bourne loves the diversity – ‘It’s all about the mix.’
Bourne is at his happiest hopping from one assignment to the next, a portrait one day, an interior the day after and the following day a still life. With the publication in March 2024 of his first retrospective book, Turn of the Century, we get to see some of Bourne’s most memorable interiors and portraits all in one place. From the aforementioned squat to the residences of some of the most important figures in fashion, art and design.
Bourne’s story begins in south London. As the photographer tells it, even as a small child he was fascinated by pictures, but it was around the time he was 12 or 13 that a lucky break set things in motion. By chance, the Bourne family lived next door to the well-regarded Australian photographer Axel Poignant. Poignant took Bourne under his wing and taught him how to make black-and-white prints. Bourne remembers being mesmerised by the process. ‘That sort of got me in the magic of the dark room, and seeing something appear in front of your eyes.’
After a long stretch assisting advertising and fashion photographers, and having thoroughly learned the tools of the trade, the young lensman decided to set out on his own. Characteristically, he shifted away from the gear and glamour of his former bosses and hit the streets. One of Bourne’s first projects focused on the famous Astor Place barber shop on lower Broadway in Manhattan. The shop specialised in fantastically crafted designs shaved into the hair of its customers. His black-and-white images of the clientele were so strong that the Independent magazine ran a full-page spread.
Around the same time, Bourne was introduced to World of Interiors editorial stylist Susan Skeen. Skeen was taken with his pictures and insisted he meet WoI founder and editor Min Hogg and the then art director, Michael Tighe. Bourne showed the colleagues his work from the Independent as well his pictures of New Age travellers. The pair loved what they saw and, says Bourne, ‘commissioned me there and then’. He was baffled, thinking his work ‘was completely irrelevant to interiors,’ but acknowledged that they clearly ‘saw something I didn’t know about’.
Bourne’s first article for WoI appeared in November 1989. Written by Ros Byam Shaw, the article took readers inside the magical home of Michael Kemp and Leonie Lawrence in Blackheath, an area of southwest London not far from where the photographer grew up. As Byam Shaw tells it, walking into the house ‘was like stepping into another world that was unsettling and bizarre, yet strangely beautiful’. Bourne recalls thinking: Who has a tree stump in their house as a cupboard?
A year later, Bourne went even further down the rabbit hole and found himself among squatting artists living in Cholmeley Dene, a formerly abandoned home ‘on the way to Highgate Hill’. The story, written for the November 1990 issue by our hero’s good friend and collaborator, former WoI subeditor Elspeth Thompson, is a kaleidoscope of art and eccentricity, beautifully portrayed through the lens.
As Thompson told it, when the group of ten artists decided to take over the space in 1989 (which had been empty for nearly a decade) ‘they knew from the beginning that Cholmeley Dene would be more than a place to live and work. The house itself was to become the work of art, and the way in which they all lived was to be part of it.’ As Bourne remembers it, the shoot was a challenge as there was no electricity. On speaking with one of the artists, he found out that it wasn’t that they didn’t have electricity, they ‘just choose not to use it’. Bourne loved the romanticism of this idea and chose this story for the book.
Turn of the Century literally begins with a turn. Instead of the standard left-to-right title on the cover, Bourne and the book’s designers, Studio Small, flipped the title on its head, running it lengthwise down the cover. The stories are arranged chronologically and, as Bourne explains, the title comes not only from the period in which he did the bulk of this work, but also from the design sensibility of that time. ‘You’ll have a Georgian house that’s got a minimal interior or you’ve got a modern house that now has Victorian furniture in it. It’s always this sort of mix-up and change of things.’ With contributions from Robin Muir and Pilar Viladas, Bourne takes readers from the 1990s to the 2010s effortlessly, giving us a glimpse of these very personal spaces, while documenting the evolution of design during this period.
To say that Turn of the Century is a who’s who of design and architecture would be an understatement. Some of the brightest stars of the last 30 years opened their doors to the photographer. In the early 2000s, Bourne photographed the home of the prince of minimalism, John Pawson, as well as the modern flat of the late architect Zaha Hadid.
With Pawson’s Notting Hill home, Bourne gently softened the starkness of a large blank wall, unlit fireplace and sharply angled wood table with dappled sunlight streaming through an unseen window. In keeping with Bourne’s feel for contrasts and mixing, the accompanying text comments: ‘From the street, the house shares the same Georgian façade as its neighbours, but inside it’s pure Pawson.’
The story behind Bourne’s photo shoot at Zaha Hadid’s home still gives him a chuckle. As he describes in the introduction, it was only after hours of negotiation that the mercurial architect agreed to have her portrait done, even though this was part of the initial deal with British Vogue who commissioned the story. The house itself feels like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Hadid’s wholly original forms for tables and chairs are highlighted by intense finishes. Bourne seems to instinctively understand Hadid’s vision and finds angles that perfectly reflect her futuristic take on the material world.
One of the snapper’s best-known portraits highlights the chapter on the artists Tim Webster and Sue Noble. In the late 1990s, Bourne lived next door to the pair, who had taken over a decrepit space in London’s Shoreditch. Bourne photographed the decaying rooms the couple were using as a studio shortly before architect David Adjaye oversaw a complete renovation and turned it into the now famous Dirty House. After the renovation was complete, Bourne returned to capture it again. His portrait of Noble and Webster captures all of their creative energy, and a bit of the punk aesthetic that most likely drove them to Shoreditch in the first place.
Twice Bourne had the opportunity to photograph the renowned industrial designer Marc Newson. First, in his bachelor pad in 1999, and then in 2010, in the home that he shares with wife, the fashion consultant Charlotte Stockdale, and their children. Bourne’s take on both spaces reflects the energy of Newson’s life at each stage. While the bachelor pad exudes a cool minimalism, their family home is awash in vibrant colours. The kids must have loved it.
More recently, Bourne has been back in the pages of WoI. He photographed Veere Grenney’s house in London for the issue of April 2023. Not surprisingly, the house is described as an ‘assured mix of mid-century furnishings with much older antiques.’ Bourne shot the murals at Berwick Church in East Sussex for the December issue of the same year. As writer Olivia Laing explained, ‘during the early days of World War II, the Right Rev George Bell became obsessed with bringing art back to the Church of England’. With this in mind, he commissioned the Bloomsbury Group artists Vanessa Bell (no relation) and Duncan Grant to paint murals throughout the church. Again, it’s a study in contrasts – a Medieval church, full of expressionistic mid-20th-century murals – a perfect fit for Bourne’s natural affinity for ‘the mix’.
Asked to articulate his approach to shooting a home, Bourne reflects that he sees his interior shoots as a form of portraiture. ‘I think with the interior side of my work I want to capture something about the people that live there, a trace of that person or personality that comes through.’ And reflecting on his relationship with the home owners: ‘I like to believe that on most occasions I came in as a stranger but left as a friend.’
‘Turn of the Century: Portraits of Creative Interiors’ (by Henry Bourne and Pilar Viladas; Rizzoli, rrp £57.95)
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