Mario Testino.

Mario Testino is one of the world’s greatest portrait photographers, well renowned for his photographs of famous women. On a recent trip to the National Portrait Gallery I was lucky enough to encounter some of his work up close. After having a good look around the Vanity Fair Exhibition I was caught immediately by one image in particular, Jennifer Aniston, after inspection I realised this image was shoot by Mario Testino, therefore I thought he would be a good person to add to my blog. Testino started out wanting to be a fashion photographer; he lived in an abandoned flat near Trafalgar Square, selling portfolios to wannabe models in order to earn enough money to live off. However knower days you would be much more likely to find him shooting people such as Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna. He was also called in to shoot Princess Diana before she died in 1997; this sequence of images is famous for being perhaps the warmest and most relaxed photographs ever.
Testino is currently on contract to Vogue and Vanity Fair, although many other magazines would kill to have him. Testino's photographs are known for variation, one image will be bright and vibrant (such as the image of Kate Moss) and another will be softly lit and elegant (such as his image of Jennifer Aniston) on looking at these photographs, they could quite easily be shot by two completely different photographers. Testino himself is said to prefer the more romantic way of shooting, the way he gets most of his images is by getting to know the sitter and becoming friends with them in order to get a much more relaxed shot. A quote from Testino "My photos are very simple. I believe the magic of photography is capturing the moment that doesn't exist a moment before or later"
Testino is specifically renowned for his photographs of women, but what about the men? As he started of being a fashion photographer he spent allot of time around women, he finds the sexiness of girls and the carefree and wildness of them exciting. One of his favourite girls would be Kate Moss, the portrait I refer to before is something a little different, people look at this image and see Kate Moss covered in really bad make-up, Testino said this image was to show that you could put anything on Kate Moss and she would still make it look good, which I think comes across clearly.
I think the reason Testinos images work so well is because he treats his sitters as people and not as models, he befriends them and gains their trust.
I would recommend going to see the Vanity Fair Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery to anyone who can go, I gained allot of inspiration and found all the photographs very interesting.