Helen Bartlett
The leading family photographer discusses her long-term love of black and white photography with Niall Hampton
Helen Bartlett
Family, baby and newborn photographer
The only family photographer in Europe to be on Canon’s ambassador programme, Bartlett is based in London.
While she has many clients in the capital, she also travels around the world to capture the essence of family life.
Believing that black and white photography suggests rather than shows, Bartlett’s visual style strives to be timeless.
She is also an in-demand speaker, sharing expertise from her 22-year career to help others elevate their craft.
helenbartlett.co.uk
Instagram: @helenbartlett photography
“Using the environment as part of graphic compositions is something I enjoy.” Canon EOS R5 Mark II, RF 50mm F1.2L USM: 1/1000 sec at f/4, ISO 100.
Helen Bartlett
Having taken up photography at the age of eight after being given a Zorki rangefinder [a Soviet-made copy of a Leica] for Christmas,
Helen Bartlett started earning an income from photography when she was a teenager. Her mother ran a nursery school in the basement of the family home and, as a summer job, Bartlett would take photos of the children. Selling their parents handmade black and white prints gave her an early taste of creating and selling photographs, so after studying history at university, she decided to make photography her career. Since then, Bartlett has gone on to become a leading family photographer. Shooting exclusively in black and white, she specialises in documenting the essence of childhood, capturing tender scenes created to resonate with her clients. Intrigued by Bartlett’s aesthetic, we asked her about her commitment to black and white…
Did you adopt black and white as your signature look because you started out in black and white, or is there just something about it that you feel works better than colour?
We had a colour darkroom at home when I was growing up, so I had experience of working with colour, but it never resonated with me. I fell in love with monochrome because the pictures my dad took of my brothers and I were in black and white. I knew they looked good when I was young, they looked good when I was a teenager and they look good today. Some of them are still on the wall with pictures I’m taking now of my nephews and nieces, as well as ones of my parents taken in the 1950s when they were children. These photographs all hang together well; monochrome is timeless.
The notion of timelessness is important to me because I’ve built a business on having repeat customers. I need the pictures that I take now to fit together with those I have taken in the past and with those I take in the future. I have some clients that I photographed as children at the beginning of my career who are now hiring me to photograph their own children, so I’m working with the second generation within a family. I need to know that my pictures will all work together and black and white is a key part of this.