a large team of assistants - all of whom are extraordinarily good-looking - on set wherever he happens to be and back in his London headquarters. “There is no Photoshop on that body,” he says. “It’s all hers. All real.” It is this knack of combining sex with glamour and a sort of naturalness - as if the sitter had been born with these - that makes Testino so popular with his subjects, whether they are Hollywood movie stars or British princesses. “These days,” he says, “I feel like a doctor who goes to the operating theatre with 30 years of experience. Now I feel that I can use all the instruments of the past to get the most interesting photograph.” It is this ability to keep moving, his range as a photographer ever expanding, that keeps Testino at the top of his field. “Fashion is about change,” he says when I ask him if he ever gets bored with shooting girls in frocks. “That’s what’s made me stay in the fashion business: the fact that it is always moving. I’m open to everything.”
Inages: Supplied by the MFA Boston which hosts Mario Testino’s ‘In Your Face’ exhibition until February 3
for Tatler and Harpers & Queen. But it was in the mid-Nineties that Testino really found his voice. It happened, he is quick to explain, when the fashion editor and former editor of French Vogue Carine Roitfeld asked him why, instead of emulating the English photographers he was clearly in awe of, he didn’t photograph models in the same way that he snapped his friends. With that, the Testino woman - a combination of innate glamour and unapologetic sex appeal was born. And she is still very much alive. Exhibit A: a sizzling Lopez wearing what might be sprayedon swimwear, all brown skin and cutaway Lycra but, and here’s the trick, looking sophisticated rather than tacky. “Oh, she’s incredible,” Testino says, drawing out the syllables in his trademark manner. Incredible, I’m sure, I say, but surely that amazing curve of her bum has been digitally helped along. Certainly, Testino need only click his fingers for this to happen, for he works with
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