Harry Borden is one of Britain’s most respected portrait photographers, known for his ability to reveal something elusive—mystery, intimacy, vulnerability—in the faces of people who are more often seen as public symbols.

Born in New York and raised in Devon, Borden first made his mark in the 1990s photographing musicians, actors, and political figures for titles like The New Yorker, Time, and Vogue. His subjects have ranged from Oasis to Margaret Thatcher, from Ewan McGregor to Holocaust survivors, and his work has been collected by the National Portrait Gallery.

The Urgency of Personal Work

For many photographers, personal photography projects are a proving ground, a way to stay sharp between jobs, attract editors, or experiment creatively. But it’s more like a lifeline for Harry Borden and it might just be the only kind of work he respects fully.

“In the editorial world now, there’s no dignity left, you’re no longer being hired for your vision or your sensitivity. You’re being told how to shoot. You’re following layout notes, ticking boxes.”

He doesn’t say this with bitterness so much as resignation. “I used to get five grand to photograph a hedge fund guy and make him look heroic,” he shrugs. “Now it’s three hundred quid and they want him against a pink background. There’s nothing in it for me.”

So he stopped chasing and turned inwards instead, seeking out projects that are emotional and reflective rather than lucrative or commercial. “It’s about having integrity, if I didn’t make work for myself, I think I’d just collapse.”

Borden’s long-term personal photography projects aren’t about passing interests or abstract concepts, they’re rooted in his own identity and drawn from the things he’s tried to understand or come to terms with.

Survivor: Confronting Silence Through Photography

His most celebrated series, Survivor: A Portrait of the Survivors of the Holocaust, is a case in point. It took over five years to complete with Harry shooting nearly 200 portraits of Holocaust survivors living in the UK, Israel, Australia and beyond. Each sitter was photographed in their own home. The resulting images are quiet, undramatic, and deeply human.

“My father was Jewish,” he says, “but we never talked about it. He was born in New York and his parents came from Ukraine and Romania but there was this silence about where we came from. This huge silence.”

The project became a way to inhabit that missing history. “I didn’t want to make anything sentimental or heroic. I just wanted to honour the fact that they were alive, still living, still here. Not figures from history. Just people.”

Shot on the hoof in between assignments or in snatched trips during family holidays, each portrait in Survivor is accompanied by a handwritten personal statement from the subject. The final book was published by Cassell and sold over 10,000 copies, a rare success for a serious photographic monograph. Images were acquired by the National Portrait Gallery and reviewed widely, with features in The Guardian, The Times, and The New York Times.

But for Borden, the work wasn’t about prestige. “It was personal,” he says. “It helped me feel more connected to something I never really got to know. It helped me understand my own family, in a way.”

Single Dad: Portraits of Fatherhood 

His next major project, Single Dad, came from an even more intimate place, his own experience of divorce.

“I got divorced in 2009,” he tells me. “And then my ex met someone else pretty soon after. I think I probably wasn’t very good at meeting her emotional needs. I was too consumed by my own stuff.”

He found himself single and contributing to raising three children, trying to make sense of a new identity. “There’s a lot of shame around being a single dad. There’s not much cultural sympathy for it. People assume you’re a failure or a flake. But most of us are trying hard.”

He started photographing other single fathers around the UK. Like Survivor, the approach was formal but intimate; medium-format portraits taken in the homes they shared with their children, with short testimonies alongside.

Like much of Borden’s work, the images avoid both pity and performance. The men are photographed as they are—tired, proud, dishevelled, resilient. “I wanted to show the nuance,” he says. “The grey areas. There’s so much mythology around fatherhood—either you’re the perfect dad or a deadbeat. But real life doesn’t look like that.”

There’s a recurring theme in Borden’s work: the portrait not as documentation but as reflection, sometimes confession. “I wasn’t trying to say something grand about fatherhood,” he says. “I was trying to understand myself through these other men.”

YouTube as Archive, Rebellion, and Connection

Borden doesn’t romanticise fatherhood. “I got a lot wrong,” he says. “I thought being physically there was enough, but I wasn’t really present.” His divorce left him, like many men, trying to piece together a different model of parenting—less provider, more human.

His YouTube channel – Fred and Harry Borden – sweetly became a way to do that.

The channel which he runs with his son Fred is lo-fi, unscripted, and oddly compelling: part oral history, part family project, and partly a collaboration that’s helped create a hard-won connection with Fred. “When Fred and I make a video, we’re building something together,” he says. “We argue, we joke, we decide things. That’s a kind of closeness we didn’t have before.”

Each episode focuses on a single shoot—sometimes celebrity commissions, sometimes personal work. Borden sits and he talks. Not about the technical settings, but about the dynamics in the room: how the subject behaved, what mood they were in, how he got the shot. It’s a study in social negotiation. The episode about Jeremy Clarkson, for example, is less a character assassination than a masterclass in quiet contempt. “He kept me waiting for hours,” Borden recalls. “Then he was dismissive. I got maybe two minutes with him. He just wasn’t interested.” The resulting work is strong but the experience clearly left a mark.

That video drew heat. “The Guardian warned me,” he says. “Told me I might damage my chances of getting commissions. But what am I meant to do—pretend I think everything’s great all the time?”

What’s striking is that the channel—which now has thousands of subscribers—doesn’t feel self-aggrandising. It’s self-aware, occasionally awkward, but refreshingly candid. That may be thanks to Fred keeps things grounded. “It’s probably the most meaningful collaboration of my life,” Borden says. “We have a relationship now that we might not have had otherwise.”

Portraiture, Mystery, and the Art of Looking

For Borden, the best portraits don’t offer up their subjects too easily. “A good image should have mystery,” he says. “If you can ‘get’ it in a second, it probably won’t stay with you. The ones you remember are the ones you keep coming back to, trying to work out what’s going on.”

That sense of enigma, he suggests, is harder to achieve than many think — and it’s why he sometimes sees more depth in portrait photography than in some documentary photography. “Documentary often tells you exactly what you’re looking at, exactly what’s happening. There’s no space for ambiguity. And I think a lot of photographers aren’t well-read, they’re not as well-informed as they could be. Without that broader knowledge, it’s hard to make work that resonates beyond the surface.”

His own career has balanced both worlds, moving between political figures and pop icons, high culture and low culture. He cites a recent portrait commission of David Lammy – shot for The Guardian – as an example of a shoot where subtlety and intention combined. “I can do high culture — like photographing David Lammy — and I can do low culture — like Oasis. It’s about approaching both with the same seriousness. You can’t phone it in, whatever the subject.”

The Lammy shoot, he says, was about showing strength without cliché, intelligence without stiffness. “You’re trying to capture a truth, but not the whole truth. If you give it all away, the picture dies.”

In the end, Borden’s work feels less like a career and more like an ongoing conversation with himself—about identity, integrity, and what pictures are really for. He’s stopped chasing the security of big-name commissions, choosing instead to focus on subjects that cut close to the bone, and refusing to flatten his vision to fit the market. Whether he’s photographing Holocaust survivors, single fathers, or political heavyweights, there’s the same insistence on honesty and a little bit of mystery. “You’ve got to make work that matters to you,” he says. “If you don’t, you’ll end up making pictures that mean nothing to anyone—including yourself.”

If you enjoyed this article, why not sign up to our mailing list or check out some more pesonal work by other photographers?