From the owner of a fish’n’chip shop to actress Kate Winslet, New York City is bursting with English people, and these expats, famous and not so famous, are the subject of a Jason Bell’s stunning new series of photographs
Long before he’d mastered a camera, let alone become one of Britain’s most successful portrait photographers of stars on both sides of the Atlantic, the seed was sown that Jason Bell would one day move to the Big Apple: “There was a picture of New York on the wall in my childhood home in Camden Town which fascinated me. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that’s the capital of the world.'”
So in 2003, with a photography portfolio full of A-listers and several works in the National Portrait Gallery collection, Bell decided to buy an apartment in New York and divide his time equally between there and London. “I had this slight feeling that I’d shot everyone in London and it was time for pastures new. When I arrived in New York I seemed to shed my baggage. I was free to be who I wanted to be. It was thrilling.”
Bell soon realized that he was by no means the only Brit getting a kick out of New York. In 2006, on an “Anglomania” shoot of British models and socialites for American Vogue in an English tea room called Tea & Sympathy, the co-owner, Nicky Perry, pointed out to him that there are more than 120,000 British people living in the city. “I suddenly thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting to find out why all these people left England?’ And, of course, I also had all these questions about what I personally was doing there.”
The result is a stunning series of photographs, entitled An Englishman in New York, comprising portraits of Bell’s fellow settlers in the Big Apple, from celebrities such as Kate Winslet and Sting, to chefs, a helicopter pilot and even a rat-catcher. Flicking through, it’s striking how many of the sitters, like Bell, trace their arrival there to a fantasy spun from childhood. It was Ella Fitzgerald’s version of Cole Porter’s “Manhattan” that hooked the singer Estelle as a teenager, while the artist Cecily Brown describes how, arriving in the East Village, she thought, “I’ve moved to Sesame Street.”
Continue reading English people in New York: portraits by Jason Bell
