Work Experience

Damien Lovegrove has spent his career creating fabulous portraits. He tells Jeff Meyer what it’s like revisiting your archive and rediscovering your work...

Damien Lovegrove is a world-renowned portrait photographer and an Fujifilm UK ambassador. He has been a TV cameraman and commercial photographer as well as a wedding and portrait photographer; now he is a writer, teacher, columnist, motivator and artist. He went to the BBC at 19 and trained to be a cameraman. He went on to train as a lighting director, leaving the BBC in 1998 to become a full time photographer.

Damien now specialises in making women look fabulous. “I’m inspired by beauty,” he says, “and as I have matured as a photographer I’ve learned to see beauty in just about everyone and everywhere. It’s not what I look at that matters: it is what I see.”

What do you think makes a good portrait photographer? 

It requires key traits like integrity, fun, respectfulness and a personable character. It wasn’t until I was in my early 30s that I began to gain the confidence needed to hone these skills. I shot my first portrait in 1996 at the age of 32.

Some of the leading photographers I met early in my career had confidence and craft skills in bucketloads, but somehow they lost the desire or focus to really push themselves to greatness, and they fell by the wayside. It takes continual practice and improvement to get the most from photography, and there are many obstacles along the way.

How did you get the initial idea for this book?