INTRODUCTION BY STEPHEN FRY Thirty years ago (and counting) I was invited by the Norfolk College of Arts and Technology to come and give a talk to students at their campus in King’s Lynn. Poor, long-suffering NORCAT had been one of the numerous institutions of learning that had suffered the misfortune of having my rebellious and tormented younger self foisted upon them. They had put up with me for two whole years – the only school or college up until that time not to expel me, a forbearance for which I will always be grateful. I do not recall much about the talk I gave but I can remember that when it was all over, just as I was streaking to the door for a quick getaway, a shyly quiet yet somehow firmly insistent voice stopped me in my tracks. ‘Mr Fry!’ A young student, his eyes alight with determination, blinked up at me. ‘Can I photograph you please? I will be remarkably quick, I promise.’ I’ll let you into a secret, I absolutely hate being photographed. My usually equable (or so I like to think) good nature is frayed and ruffled by even the friendliest and most quietly efficient photographers. If they talk too much I get irked, if they are too silent I work myself up into believing them rude. I try to overcome or at least hide these wholly unreasonable feelings of animosity and resentment that surge and swill around inside me when submitting myself to the lens, but this antipathy does mean that when I am asked to sit for a portrait that isn’t a contractual publicity obligation I always say no.
STEPHEN FRY Norfolk 21 April 1990
If you had told me that I would meekly allow myself to be steered by a student photographer, an inexperienced amateur, into a prepared and well-lighted little makeshift studio without a murmur of protest, I would never have believed you. But we all have instincts, and there was something in this young man’s manner that told me (doubtless at a very deep subconscious
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