By Nigel Farndale Last Updated: 5:08PM GMT 24 Feb 2009  Mario Testino: 'When I was young I wanted to be a priest. Doing these charitable things has made me feel that I have got some of the priestly instinct back.' Photo: Barwerd Van der Plas  Mario Testino in Peru, aged 18  Mario Testino: 'When I photographed Diana, the first thought was, do I want to be the voyeur who respectfully photographs the princess in her tiara, or do I sit her next to me and do her like she is my mate? Photo: AP  Save the Children clinic in Peru for which Testrino auctioned off one of his prints of Diana for £100,000 Photo: Barwerd Van der Plas  As Mario Testino moves through the café, customers and waiters alike step out of his way. It is not that he is sharp elbowed. The opposite, in fact. He doesn’t move his arms as he walks and, thanks to a long overcoat, it looks as if he is not moving his legs either. His head seems pretty still, too, although this may be related to the black scarf he wears like a neck brace, fussily arranged so that each end is draped over a shoulder. He has composure, in a word. An air of superiority. Over all, the impression he gives is of being a human log floating calmly on a rippling social pond.  He also has a certain style, as you would expect from the man who helped discover Kate Moss and Gisele, who became the favourite photographer not only of Diana, Princess of Wales, but also Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna, and who persuaded Sir Elton John to get on all fours for a Vogue shoot, so that Elizabeth Hurley could ride on his back. He sits down in a favourite corner – this is his local, around the corner from his house in Holland Park – and, as he sips a frothy coffee, he reminisces about the second time he photographed Madonna.  It was in 1997, for the cover of her album Ray of Light. ‘At 2pm she said, “OK, I’m tired. We’re done.” And I said, “But I don’t have the pictures yet.” She said, “You’re working for me and I say we’re done.” I said, “No, we carry on.” The picture she used on the cover came after that. She didn’t intimidate me, you see. I thought, I have to push my luck here, so I started keeking her like dis, with my foot.’ He gives me a demonstration, under the table. ‘She was, like, “Hey, what are you doing?” And I was, like, move here, move here,” and suddenly this created an eentimacy. When these people come across someone who treats them as an equal, it puts them at their ease.’  Interesting theory. Remind me never to test it out. You see, I imagine it also helps if you have the sort of open, friendly face that Testino has – imperious and a little jowly, with warm hazel eyes and a slightly divergent squint. His languid, confiding manner probably helps too. As I’m sure do his sleepy, Peruvian vowels, the ones that stretch out his sentences like bubbles of gum.  His photography has made him wealthy, but has it also divorced him from reality? ‘Not at all. When I came to study in London in 1976, I moved into an unconverted floor of a hospital. A dossers’ home. I didn’t have money to eat, let alone get a bus. So I have never lost the sense that tomorrow I might not have any work. It took me years to pay off my overdraft.’ The dossers shared the hospital with a hostel for alcoholics. People would urinate in the stairwells, but the parties were legendary. ‘Everyone thought we were mad to live there but we used to get all the old hospital beds up from the cellar and throw doctors and nurses evenings, with guests dressed up as people who had been in car accidents.’  He was a photography student at the time, funding himself by working as a waiter – not an obvious job for someone with a phobia about getting his hands dirty. That he had his hair dyed pink at the time probably didn’t help his waiting career either, but no doubt it helped him get noticed as a photographer.  Presumably he could afford to retire now? ‘I still have mortgages and still pay wages and the way things are going in my business even I could run out of money. I don’t think I will ever have enough money. I don’t think I will ever retire. I’m 54. I’m a spender. I like spending on projects.’ He also likes spending other people’s money, there being some notable examples of him refusing to cut corners in order to get the perfect image. One Harpers & Queen fashion shoot, which featured 30 extras, was dubbed ‘Murder on the American Express’.  I ask if there is an argument for needing more glamour in a recession, not less. ‘Sure we are going through an economic crisis but luckily I’m adaptable. I go to where the work is. One year I might make money, the next I might not. But it is not what I want to base my life on. I adore being able to go to the Oscars and know every single person at the party afterwards. But that’s not really my life. My time off is with the friends I have known since I was a kid.’  Testino grew up in Lima, the eldest son of a businessman. He was not popular at school, he says, because of his flamboyance. But he was good at maths and went on to study economics at Lima University, where his insistence on wearing pink flares and platform heels around the campus ensured that everyone knew his name.  Nowadays, Testino rarely stays in the same country for more than a couple of weeks, and when he boards a plane he turns left into first class, unless it’s a Lear jet or a Gulfstream. He was in Paris yesterday. Tomorrow he will be in Berlin. But most of his work is in the US where he has a house on the West Coast and where he is a regular for Vogue and Vanity Fair. In recent months he has been travelling for reasons other than work. In his role as a Save the Children ambassador he has raised money to build a playground in a Moscow children’s hospital specialising in cancer (because that was the disease his brother died of at the age of 10). He has also recently returned from Lima, where he opened a children’s clinic intended to help victims of the 2007 earthquake. ‘When I was young I wanted to be a priest. Don’t get me wrong, I am no saint now; I can be terrible, getting plastered, being wild. But doing these charitable things has made me feel that I have got some of the priestly instinct back. I know people who have everything and all they do is complain and bicker. Give off negative energy. When you try and do something positive it helps others but also makes you feel better about yourself.’  Last year Testino donated a sitting at Elton John’s White Tie and Tiara Ball. It went for a staggering $1.8 million, (£1.26 million) bought by a Ukrainian businessman. ‘It was strange,’ he recalls. ‘I was on stage, being auctioned. Stella McCartney and Elle Macpherson were bidding against each other but didn’t win me. That ball is for Aids victims, another charity close to my heart. I have had many friends die of Aids.’ He has had to stop donating sittings for the moment, though. ‘Everyone was asking me for one and you have this dilemma, do you give it to the editor of American Vogue, or British Vogue, or French Vogue? You would end up doing nothing else, so now I just donate prints.’ In the case of the Lima clinic, that meant auctioning one of his prints of Diana for £100,000. I know. Gasp.  I ask what the villagers of Lima make of his jet-set life. ‘I don’t think they actually know what my life is like. Anyway, I am not really of that world, I just work in it. I’m not a dilettante who goes from party to party.’  He doesn’t? That’s not what I’ve heard. ‘Well, yes, I do go to a lot of parties. A lot. But you can be of that circle and not completely be a part of it. I think the relationship a photographer has with celebrities is different from the one an interviewer has. I have to get as intimate as I can. But I can be just as intimate and personal with a Peruvian villager as I am with a Hollywood actress. I don’t make a distinction between the celebrity and the non-celebrity.’  But they do. Doesn’t Elizabeth Hurley call non-celebrities ‘civilians’? ‘Of course, but in some ways it can be tough being looked at every day, some celebrities are like “just leave me alone”.’ So how does he persuade a celebrity who wants to be left alone that it is a good idea to spend time posing for him so that they can appear on the covers of magazines? ‘I’ve realised I’m a performer so when I photograph people I act. I lohv making people laugh. I lohv teasing people. I say things other people wouldn’t dream of saying.’  Such as? ‘Yesterday I was photographing someone and I had to be in a funny position and I could see my stomach was hanging like this…’ He leans forward. ‘So I started talking about that and the person I was photographing started laughing and forgot about themselves. They thought I was more worried about myself, so they let go. I make it less about them and more about me. Lately I’ve started noticing that. I told someone the other day, “Look, when I turn my head my cheek follows a second later.” The magic comes when a sitter is not self-conscious. If you see someone arrive at a party and they are self-conscious, unable to make eye contact, that will not be the person you are attracted to. But if someone breezes through, smiling and at ease, you are drawn to them.’  Indeed. As the fashion-booking editor for Vogue once put it: ‘People prefer to be photographed by Testino because he makes everyone look beautiful.’ Kate Moss is more specific. ‘He sees me sexier than other people.’ Fond of imitating his thick accent she adds, ‘Mario is da best.’  But not everybody is a fan. One fashion editor, who for obvious reasons does not want to be named, has described Testino’s photographs as ‘the apotheosis of shallowness’, noting their lack of nuance. Such critics focus on his shameless commerciality. He has a retort to that.‘You have to get people to stand up and go to the shops.’ He has other philosophies to guide him through life. His main one is that it is important to tan properly in the sun, rather than using fake tan or sunbeds.  What about when celebrities are notoriously controlling of their image – celebrities such as Madonna? ‘I was really lucky with Madonna because she was the first celebrity to come to me that wasn’t just a model. It was before Diana. With her I knew I had discovered my style because I like to believe what I am photographing. A certain reality. You know with digital you can do anything. I could be photographed sitting here with you and then in the lab you could be replaced with a pink elephant. When I started I wouldn’t do airbrushing but then I came to see it was OK for wrinkles but not everywhere, you know, leave the natural texture of the skin. When Madonna first came to meet me in a hotel I said, “My God, I have never seen you like this without make up!” Before, you know, I had only ever seen her being the tough girl, or Marilyn, or the rock chick. Instead she came in looking very natural, no make up, flat shoes and ponytail. So I said: “Can I photograph you like this? See who the Madonna without foundation is?” She agreed, but when I showed her the photographs before retouching she was, like, “Oh my God, people don’t want to see me like this.” I showed them to her again after I had done a little retouching and she was happy. She understood what I was trying to do without the make up.  ‘That was a milestone for me. It was for a Versace couture collection, when Gianni was still alive, and when it came out it was billed as “Versace presents Madonna by Testino.” And I was a no one. Who is this Testino? Until then the only photographers known only by their surnames were Newton, Avedon and Bailey. It did change the way people saw me. I became a brand.’ (A powerful one, when Testino started shooting for Gucci in 1995, sales increased by £266 million in a year.)  Madonna was so impressed with the natural look Testino had captured, she booked him again and again. ‘When Madonna got pregnant I was with her taking pictures of her tummy moving, while hundreds of photographers were outside, desperate for her.’  He tried a similarly informal approach with Diana, for a Vanity Fair shoot in 1997, just months before she died. ‘When I photographed Diana, the first thought was, do I want to be the voyeur who respectfully photographs the princess in her tiara, or do I sit her next to me and do her like she is my mate?’ We know the answer, and there is something quite flirtatious about that shoot. Was the Princess flirting with him, or the camera? ‘She wanted to be liked but to me the word flirt contains a sexual energy so I don’t think it was that. I am accused of flirting. Anna Wintour [editor of American Vogue] says I flirt with everyone, young, old, male, female. I don’t think it was so much that Diana wanted me to like her, she just wanted me to make her look good.’  At first the Princess sat with her knees together and her hands in her lap. Testino persuaded her to kick off her shoes, take off her jewellery and stretch out on a sofa. ‘I explained that I wanted to give her a new look. She told me that she trusted me completely, so we straightened her hair and gave her more natural make up. I wanted her to look like a person not a princess. I caught her in a moment when she had freed herself from a lot of burdens.’ Was he aware at the time of having taken a special set of photographs? ‘I wasn’t as excited about it as I perhaps should have been. Diana did not have a clear idea of how she wanted to be photographed, she wanted to leave it up to me. That is how it should be. If I go to a dentist, I don’t tell him how to do his job, but some people do come and tell me that I am better from this side. It is insecurity. There will be one picture of themselves they liked and they will think this is how I ought to be always. Me, I like change.’  He thinks models, singers and actresses have a right to feel insecure about their appearance, because if their beauty is compromised so is their livelihood. ‘These people are immediately recognisable and they like to stay in that persona. They can get trapped in their persona, but then all of us can. We all wear masks. I look in the mirror and see that person I know and I want to stay like that, I don’t want to age. That is why people have plastic surgery, because they are not seeing the person they are. I think people have come to the conclusion that when they come to me they will look good, regardless. I don’t know what this is, maybe I have an eye. The more people trust me, the better it is. When I am working with an actress I will sit with her during make up and I might say, “I don’t like this eye liner here,” or “this lipstick makes you look mean, try this” and so on. It reassures them.’  The Peruvian is said to inhabit a microclimate of flattery but he reckons it is not flattery he trades in, because that implies falseness. When he tells Kate Moss that she is looking beautiful he means it. Does a supermodel need to hear that? ‘Oh God, it is incredible. People say they must grow tired of the compliments, but whoever grew tired of being complimented?’ Do men need reassurance too? ‘Sure. Sometimes I’ve been criticised by my editors for arriving on a shoot without having seen a film by an actor. George Clooney asked me what I had seen him in and I said, “I’ve haven’t seen anything you’ve been in” and he said, “Really? How very flattering.” He is very funny like that. I told him I had just photographed his friend Brad Pitt the previous week and hadn’t seen any of his films either, apart from one on a plane, but I only saw the start of that because I fell asleep. At the end of the sitting George gave me a folded bit of paper and said, “Call me. You must come and stay with me in Como where I have a beautiful house.” I got home, opened the paper and there was this number. I rang it and Brad Pitt answered. George is a funny guy, you know. I lohv that.’  So what films does he like? ‘Italian films from the Seventies. Anyway, in cinema I am more interested in woman actors that men actors. I like beauty. And glamour. I want escapism when I go to the cinema, I don’t want to suffer. It’s not my thing. I went to see Gwyneth Paltrow in Proof, the play not the film. She is someone I have become close to. We bond because she speaks Spanish. Afterwards I had dinner with her and I couldn’t find the real Gwyneth because I couldn’t stop thinking of her in the play.’  His photographs of the actress are among his most memorable, with her backlit and looking ghostly. His style is known as ‘luxury realism’ and his images have come to define the age of the celebrity in the way that David Bailey’s images of the Krays, the Beatles and Twiggy came to define the Swinging Sixties. In 2002 there was a retrospective of Testino’s work at the National Portrait Gallery. It attracted more visitors, nearly 170,000, than any other show in the museum’s history. Charles Saumarez Smith, then the director of the NPG, was accused of dumbing down and pandering to our obsession with celebrity. He responded by comparing Testino to court artists and portraitists, from Holbein to Reynolds. ‘There is a strong relationship between Mario’s work and the general tradition of portrait artists,’ he said at the time. ‘Just like court artists in the past, he works to a tight timetable and significant commercial constraints.’  Testino persuaded Kate Moss to perch on the loo, her knickers lowered. Did he worry that he had taken advantage of her trust in him, because she would do anything he asked of her? ‘I am a documenter. When I did my book, Let Me In, I photographed people with their children and people naked and I asked them if they were OK with it. You have to do everyone differently. When I photographed the Queen of Jordan I thought “throne”, I didn’t think “lavatory”. I’m very careful. When I was younger Naomi (Campbell) and Kate once complained to me that a photographer had taken semi nudes of them and published them without asking their permission. He had made money out of them and they were furious. From then I thought I’ll never do that. When Diana died I could have made a lot of money from those pictures by giving them to an agency. But I thought her kids are alive, her image is theirs, it belongs to them not me. You know, I adore my mother. I would hate someone using a picture of her. Instead I restricted their use, made sure that they wouldn’t be used in a negative way. I gave myself those rules, no one told me. I believe what you give you get back and that was why the boys asked me to do their portraits, and Prince Charles did too.’  He says that the Prince of Wales has an extraordinarily healthy relationship with his sons. ‘I noticed this when I first did their Christmas card. I exploited it – the way children always tease their parents. I kept saying, “Harry, William – go and tease your dad.” And Charles was, like, “Mario! You’re supposed to be on my side!” ’ Testino has a nice line when asked if he is gay – he says he does not like labels (except Gucci). When I ask if he would like to have children of his own one day he points out that he has 13 godchildren. ‘But I never wanted to have my own children. I have my assistants and they are like my family. I feel like a father to them. So many of my assistants have become photographers. It is so exciting to see their names in magazines.’  He says he also feels proud of Kate Moss, whom he first photographed when she was 16. ‘With some models you can fall asleep, which is understandable because I am 54 and they might be 17. But a day with Kate is always a memorable day.’  Does he feel protective towards her? ‘I become protective, of course, because people throw weird energies at her, like envy. A lot of the time I want to put an arm around her. She didn’t have a proper youth because she was so young when she started modelling. So young. She never partied then, so never got it out of her system. But she is a smart girl. Clever. Sophisticated. In some ways she is a kid but in other ways I ask her for advice.’  It is a charming thought, the old photographer turning to the young model for advice. It shows humility, and a little vulnerability, and suggests another reason why Kate Moss and her fellow supermodels think Mario is da best.
Mario Testino has charmed Diana, kicked Madonna and insulted George Clooney &#57380;    all part of a day's work for the world's most in-demand celebrity    photographer. Recently he left the glitz behind to help earthquake victims    in his Peruvian hometown. 'But don't get me wrong,' he says, 'I'm no saint'.