Mary McCartney says my photography is work - not just a family album of my starry life
Photographer Mary McCartney captures the rich and the famous from Kate Moss to Gwyneth Paltrow and her pop star father Paul - but says the pictures are mostly work, not a snapshot of her life.
A new book and accompanying exhibition of her work, launched with a starry party last night and open to the public from today, covers two decades of photographs of her family, including fashion designer sister Stella, and a cast of A-listers such as Cara Delevingne, Morrissey and Jude Law.
But the 45-year-old Londoner said portraits of the bright and beautiful sit alongside other projects, such as behind the scenes at the Royal Opera House or with the West End cast of A Chorus Line, as well as landscapes and portraits of the Andalusian horse she sometimes rides.
Mary McCartney: Monochrome And Colour book launch
She said: “Sometimes it gets picked up that [my work] is me and my friends, but I don’t go out with my friends and say, ‘I’m going to take pictures of everyone and put them in a book’. Pretty much all the people in the exhibition apart from my direct family are where I was taking photographs for a professional purpose.”
McCartney said she was interested in finding people’s stories and showing the hard work behind a performance or a fashion show: “I grew up seeing that it would take a crew of 80 to put together a performance, that there’s a lot of work and craft that goes on behind the scenes.
“When I go on a shoot, it all sounds so glamorous and to a degree it is. But it can be a slog and it can be cold and you can spend hours on end standing in a soggy field trying to get the shot.”
She chose 50 pictures - on sale from about £3,500 each - from an archive of about 500,000 images for the exhibition. There is also a two-volume book of 300 images. One of the first images in the show is a pair of hands - with a frog - belonging to her late mother, Linda, who was also a renowned photographer. “I wouldn’t be a photographer without her,” McCartney said.
The Monochrome/Colour exhibition curated by de Pury de Pury runs to December 5 at 3 Grafton Street, W1, admission free. The book is published by GOST at £75.
