It is as the artist of ‘those’ pictures
of Diana, Princess of Wales that
Demarchelier is best known

On the eve of a new exhibition, Diana’s favourite photographer Patrick Demarchelier reveals what he really thinks about his subjects. Celia Walden reports

As a teenager, Patrick Demarchelier used to charge his friends and family a few centimes each to take and retouch their photographs. Today, a portrait by Demarchelier - if he’s inclined to take it - will set you back tens of thousands of pounds. But don’t expect the blemishes to be airbrushed away: Demarchelier has now tired of what he describes as today’s "perfection-obsessed" society and the photographers and image-makers who "want to turn all women into models".

"That’s where they go wrong," he says, traces of the little boy from Le Havre in northern France all but buried under an Americanised French accent (the product of 35 years spent living in New York). "I like it less and less. I never touched my pictures of Diana."

It is as the artist of "those" pictures of Diana, Princess of Wales that Demarchelier is best known. Relaxed and laughing but with that core sadness still apparent, her manufactured coyness, which had become her default position in front of the camera, was at last undone. The photographs were described as "iconoclastic" and Diana took the unusual step of requesting that Demarchelier be her personal photographer - the first non-British, official photographer of the Royal family.

Demarchelier’s Diana pictures are part of a 30-year retrospective at Paris’s Petit Palais, the capital’s museum of fine arts, opening later this month. Before meeting the man the fashion industry refers to as "divine" - in the holy, not the luvvie, sense - I have prepared my schmaltz deflectors. Having met Mario Testino, fashion’s other golden snapper, I am convinced Demarchelier will be the kind of grade-A sycophant all too prevalent in the fashion photography world.

But when we meet in his hotel room at the Plaza Athénée, I hadn’t factored in two things: Demarchelier is French, not Italian, and therefore less prone to gushing - and he is also a sprightly, sober-minded, occasionally sharp-talking 65-year-old. The ferocious, forbidding features of the early 1990s, when he was photographing Diana, have mellowed into those of a kindly old man. Wearing a black cotton shirt, faded jeans and natty white, Superga-style trainers, he looks as if he would be more at home in espadrilles, playing boules in a southern French square.

To begin with, he shows a surprising desire to please. But being the subject of attention makes him uncomfortable. Even reminiscences of Diana, at first, fail to break down his reticence. "That inquest was so ridiculous," he mutters. "All those conspiracy theories… If you were going to kill someone, there are easier ways to do it.

"I remember when she first contacted me. I had done a picture for Vogue in which a model was opening her coat to show a picture of a little, laughing boy tucked into the inside pocket. The boy was, in fact, my son, and Diana, maybe because of her little boys, loved that picture so much that she got in touch. We became friends. She was funny and kind - but fundamentally she was a very simple woman who liked very simple things."

It is often said that one of Demarchelier’s key attributes is gaining his subjects’ trust, enabling him to capture a spontaneity other photographers are forced to falsify.

"Diana didn’t pose like a model, and I had to work at getting her to relax. But I knew what I wanted because I had seen paparazzi pictures of her laughing, and that was when she was at her prettiest."

Though described by the writer Glenn O’Brien as "a worshipper of female beauty", Demarchelier insists that he finds equal inspiration everywhere: in landscapes, animals - even ugliness. "I do like beauty, but an older woman can be beautiful and a clever woman is beautiful because that beauty shines through." Judging from his portfolio, that egalitarian approach has remained more or less theoretical.

Yes, there are the personalities - Reagan, Clinton, Tom Cruise, Elton John, Madonna, Robert De Niro and Anthony Hopkins - but it’s the beauties and the nudes on which he gorges himself: hundreds of sinuous-bodied top models, Claudia Schiffer naked on a stony beach, Naomi Campbell wearing only Masai warrior paint. All have that voyeuristic appeal that comes from the subject being caught unawares.

"Look," he says impatiently, when I point this out, "I love all women. Women are sublime beings. I love all of it: their eyes, their noses, their bodies." Is it sexual? Has he, despite his enduring and happy marriage to a former Danish model, Mia, with whom he has three children, ever been tempted by his subjects?

"Tempted to do what?" he counters with a prurient smile.

Tempted, like David Bailey, to step out from behind the camera? But perhaps, I suggest, worried I have offended him, he is able to take photographs with detachment?

"Detachment?" he says, appalled. "Not at all. My sessions are very heated affairs. When I take nude photos, it’s very sexual. But I’m quite particular about my nudes. I don’t like exhibitionist women, like the ones you see in the pages of Playboy.

The Daily Telegraph