In profile

When Polly Borland graduated from art school in Naarm/Melbourne in 1983, there were already clear signs of the direction her career would take. ‘All my folios were just full of photos of people,’ says Borland, speaking on a video call from her home in Los Angeles, her oversized purple glasses glowing in the Californian sunlight. ‘I’ve always been very drawn to people – socially, emotionally and visually as well.’

Borland went on to become one of the world’s most respected portrait photographers. She has shot Hollywood stars, sporting legends and world leaders for publications such as Vogue and The New York Times throughout the 1990s and 2000s, earning acclaim for her playful images that revealed her sitters’ quirks. Many of Borland’s portraits were exhibited in galleries and museums, notably in 2000, when the National Portrait Gallery in London commissioned her to photograph 50-odd Australians who were prominent in public life in the UK, including Kylie Minogue, Elle Macpherson and Germaine Greer. That exhibition, Australians, travelled to the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra in 2001, and a selection of recently acquired works from that series will be on show at the Gallery in 2024. Shortly after the original Australians show, Borland left editorial portraiture behind to focus on her fleshy, abstract, human-like forms in photographs and sculpture. ‘It’s still about people,’ she explains. ‘But it’s more of a general comment on humanity, rather than a specific comment on one person.’

Although Borland is now based in LA and worked for many years in London, it was in her hometown of Melbourne that she started her career. While she was at university, the city was undergoing a cultural boom.

It was an era now known as the ‘little band scene’, when musicians would form groups for a night or two, then dissolve and reform with a different line-up. These ever-changing bands attracted a vibrant fanbase of artists, fashion designers, actors and more to their concerts in St Kilda and Fitzroy, sparking a period of intense creative ferment.

Borland began working as a freelance photographer immediately after she graduated, even though she had no professional experience. ‘I didn’t know much about lighting or anything technical,’ Borland admits. ‘I learnt on the job.’ One of the first editors to commission her was Ashley Crawford, who founded the buzzy art magazine Tension, which was published bimonthly from 1983 to 1990. For Tension, Borland took portraits of Australian artists such as Howard Arkley, Vivienne Shark Lewitt and Jenny Watson. She also photographed Keith Haring, the American pop artist whose unique visual language drew attention to social and political issues, when he was brought to Australia in 1984 by the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art.

In Melbourne, Borland also had a brief flirtation with fashion photography. She had become close friends with the fashion designers Martin Grant and Fiona Scanlan, who she had a few successful shoots with. ‘But when it wasn’t with my friends, I couldn’t make it work,’ says Borland. Her failure to make it as a fashion photographer fuelled a growing frustration she felt at the time, even though she was by then taking portraits for the country’s top magazines, including Vogue Australia. ‘I felt like I had to get out. At the time we were all looking to England,’ she says. ‘The magazines I loved were The Face, ID, Blitz – they were really incredible.’ So Borland was thrilled when her then-boyfriend, now husband, John Hillcoat, was invited to screen his directorial debut Ghosts … of the Civil Dead at the London Film Festival in 1989. ‘We flew to London and never came back,’ she says. Their first few years in the UK weren’t easy. Borland struggled to get work and took a waitressing job to pay the bills. ‘It took three years, but eventually portrait work came in,’ says Borland. When it did, it came in droves. She was soon jetting around the world to photograph celebrities, tycoons and world leaders, including a pre-presidential Trump in his penthouse in New York (‘he was manipulative’) and Silvio Berlusconi at the Chigi Palace in Rome (‘intimidating’).

This period of Borland’s life sounds glamorous, and at times it was, but there was a flipside to it. ‘It was extremely stressful,’ she says. ‘It was always about pleasing the magazine, or pleasing whoever had commissioned the photograph. It was never about pleasing me. If someone took too long to call about photographs I’d taken, I’d be stressed out of my brain, thinking they hated them. I was very insecure.’ The highest point of Borland’s portraiture career was also her breaking point. In 2001, she was invited by Buckingham Palace to photograph Queen Elizabeth II on the occasion of her Golden Jubilee. Borland only had five minutes with the Queen and was so panicked during the shoot that at one point she tried to reposition the monarch by grabbing her ankles – a major faux pas. Luckily, Hillcoat stepped in and said, ‘ma’am, Polly means step to the left’. The shoot resulted in two portraits that have been widely acclaimed by critics, but Borland was so stressed by the experience that she barely remembers it. ‘I’d burned myself out,’ she says. Exhausted, she decided to step away from portraiture. ‘I knew I had to return to my original intention, which was to make my own work. Editorial photography was always supposed to be a way for me to make a living, so that I could make my own work. But unfortunately, being an obsessive person, I went into it full throttle.’

Borland began several series in the following years, including Bunny, a subversive take on the sexualised photographs of women that were published by magazines such as Playboy, and Smudge. For the latter, Borland would dress models in costumes and wigs, wrap their faces in stockings to hide their identities, then take a portrait of them. The resulting characters are recognisably human, but their gender is ambiguous and their features have been made unnervingly strange. One person is wearing a leotard stuffed with ping-pong balls, so their skin appears lumpy. Another has had their nose replaced with what looks like an elephant’s trunk. Smudge has informed much of Borland’s more recent work, in which she’s encased her models’ entire bodies in tights, pushing them into ever more alien shapes for her to photograph. After years zoning in on the features that made her subjects unique – the pore-less sheen of a celebrity’s skin, or the macho posture of a politician – Borland is now erasing the individual. In her art, she’s focusing on the universal wonder of the human body, and its capacity to be simultaneously comic and terrifying, attractive and repulsive.

In 2023, Borland pushed herself into new creative territory by unveiling her first sculptures. Her largest to date, Bod, is a 7-foot-tall faceless but anthropomorphic figure that in May 2023 was installed in the desert outside the Texas town of Marfa, where it will remain for a year. Although this is the first time Borland is exhibiting work other than photography, she says it has felt like a natural progression. ‘In lots of my photos, I’m using the body as sculpture, I’m using the body like I’d use clay – kneading it, pulling it, moving it,’ she says. ‘It’s been great to move my sculptures off the page and into the real world.’

While her abstract art remains her focus, once every few years Borland will accept a portrait commission if she finds the subject particularly interesting. Her most recent shoot was with Jennifer Coolidge, who she photographed for the June–July 2023 cover of Harper’s Bazaar Australia. ‘Who would say no to her?’ Borland says. ‘Her performance in White Lotus is one of the best comic performances I’ve ever seen.’ Looking back, Borland has mixed feelings about her editorial portraits. ‘I loved doing portraits, but I had no creative freedom. But looking at the Australians in particular, I still love a few of them,’ she says. Her favourites include her photographs of actor Toni Collette, ballerina Leanne Benjamin and musician, writer and actor Nick Cave, who has been a close friend since they met in Melbourne in the 1980s. ‘How did I get away with that one – how did he get away with it?’ asks Borland, laughing. In his portrait, Cave is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a lewd phrase. ‘It was completely inappropriate then and it is now. I can’t believe it was shown at the National Portrait Galleries in London and Canberra. It’s mind-boggling to me.’

It’s mind-boggling, too, that Borland’s punk-loving group of friends from 1980s Melbourne have all achieved such global success. Borland’s work has been published by all the magazines she worshipped. Hillcoat has directed Hollywood blockbusters. Cave is one of the acclaimed rock stars of his generation. Paris-based fashion designer Martin Grant runs his own label. These Australians abroad tend to return a few times a year, though Borland admits she has a ‘love-hate’ relationship with her home country. ‘I don’t think there’s ever been a full reckoning among white Australians of what our ancestors did – the reality of the cruel history of colonialism. And if you don’t reckon with that original sin, then we are doomed to repeat that cruelty over and over again,’ she says. ‘But I do love Australia. I love Australians. I love the sense of space. I always love coming back.’