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SOMEDAY MY PRINTS WILL COME

Helena Christensen interview
The Independent on Sunday, August 2003

SHE’S in the water when I arrive, and so the first I see of Helena Christensen is her emerging from the twinkling sea off Nice, and walking across the grey stone beach to the waterside restaurant, wearing an orange and brown floral-print bikini. Ursula Andress’s immortal arrival in “Doctor No” seems, all of a sudden, something of a warm-up act.
  That Helena Christensen is extravagantly, preposterously beautiful is hardly a revelation, but it verges on the overwhelming in the flesh and, more importantly, when set against a backdrop of the pinking mis-shapes in mercilessly revealing swimwear that populate the rest of the beach; God may have created man in his own image, he has clearly contracted much of the assembly work out to some real cowboys. As Christensen strolls towards the table, she looks rather like the result of one remorseful morning when He decided He should really put His back into it for a change, make more of an effort, stop being so damn sloppy. Hers is that rare sort of beauty that transcends anything so grubby and venal as human lust, and which you find yourself regarding with the same bewildered reverie as you might a particularly sensational sunset, at least until you start worrying that you more resemble some wretched, mud-covered primitive gawping at an eclipse, and pull yourself together sufficiently to shake hands.
  Proper introductions are made, she wraps a dress around herself, and sits down at the table with me, her agent, Thalia, who met me at Nice airport, and three other friends and/or associates. We have lunch; she orders twice the amount anyone else does, and leaves little for the pigeons. For the purposes of a proper interview, she suggests relocating to umbrella-shaded sunbeds on the beach. While I’m organising my tape recorder, she remarks on the heat, and I mumble absently that I suppose it is quite hot, yes.
  “Do you mind,” she asks brightly, “if I take my dress off?”
  Several answers suggest themselves, but I’m not especially happy with any of them, except possibly the one where I just sprint into the water and swim frantically until I’m beyond the reach of the lifeguards, on the grounds that this interview, and possibly life itself, is unlikely to improve from this point onwards. No, I eventually mumble, not at all. The now bikini-clad Helena Christensen lies down, and I take the only dignified course left to me, which is to remove my sunglasses, and make very, very sure to maintain eye contact.

WE are here today to talk about Helena Christensen’s photography, something which she insists has always been her real passion. She is about to present the first ever exhibition of her pictures, titled “People & Portraits”, at London’s Proud Gallery. Some of the collection will be recent work, commissioned by Levi’s jeans, of assorted celebrities (Robbie Williams, Bono, Michael Stipe, Sadie Frost, among others) wearing items of Levi’s clothing. The rest will be selections from a body of work which Christensen has been assembling for some time.
  “I started shooting when I was 17,” she explains. “I started modelling because I figured that would get me around, so I could do more photography.”
  This is something like hearing Michael Schumacher announce that he’d always wanted to be a mechanic, but the more Christensen talks about photography, the more genuine she seems. She talks of her favourite photographers (Ansell Adams, Bruce Weber, Irving Penn) with a reverence verging on awe. She admits to daydreams of a summons from the Magnum agency (“I have this fantasy of them calling up and saying ‘We haven’t seen any of your work, but we trust you. You’re in.”). She is – and yes, she’s aware of the irony – nervous about being exhibited.
  “What, are you crazy? It’s going to be a nightmare. I’m going to have to get so very drunk. I’ve never seen any of my work hanging up like this. It’s going to be so weird.”
  What would be fun, I suggest, is to go along in disguise a few days after opening night, and see what the punters are saying.
  “That would be a good scene in a movie, wouldn’t it? Everyone going ‘Man, she’s got no fucking idea what she’s doing, she should stick to her day job,’ and then I walk out of there with my wig dropping off.”
  The obviously impossible to dislike Helena Christensen is 34 years old, and has been famous, in one way or another, for half that time, since being crowned Miss Denmark in 1986 (“That was an accident,” she protests. “I didn’t know what the audition was for.”) Christensen has been famous for being a famous model, and famous for being famous, most famously during the years in which she went out with the late INXS singer Michael Hutchence. I don’t ask about any of this, on the grounds that it’s old news, and not really any of my business anyway. But I am interested in what she’s learnt about fame and where it falls, and about what works on each side of the camera.
  “It’s really strange,” she says. “A lot of the portraits I’ve done for this exhibition, these are people who can command the attention of 100,000 people. Then, when you have them alone, in that intimate environment of doing a portrait, you realise that they’re completely vulnerable, and they’re shy about it, and they feel really bad. Robbie Williams was like that, and he’d just done three nights at Knebworth.”
  Well, this is what I mean. There are, in this world, any number of vibrant and beautiful people who disappear as soon as they’re stuck on a stage or in front of a camera, and that’s why we never hear much of them. There are also those who are quiet, shy and unassuming in day-to-day life, but who grow three feet taller under a spotlight.
  “Some people can do that, and it’s fascinating to watch. I guess it’s the personality, the aura, some people just shine. I’ve thought a lot about why some people become famous, and sometimes you realise that there is a reason for that, that they have this light, this spirit in them. I don’t know if I have that knack of going into a room and commanding attention like that.”
  I reckon, you know, you probably do. . .
  “But you never know if that’s because you have a great effect on them or if people are going ‘Oh, it’s that girl, what’s-her-name’. I don’t feel like I’m walking in and sighs are rolling around the room.”
  Seriously?
  “Okay, I guess I’m. . . I don’t know, photogenic. See, if you become a model and you work well. . . I can look at old photos and see that I knew how to move, but you know what? I never actually thought about it other than thinking that I found it easy. And I think if you find something easy it must mean you’re good at it. I found it completely easy. I had no worries with it, and I never thought too much about it.”
  Do you ever get professionally judgemental when other photographers are photographing you?
  “I do, a bit. I’m very impatient. I can’t deal with someone taking too long, because I know how quickly these things can be done – in fact, I should maybe be slower as a photographer so I can do more craft, but I just can’t. I like the energy of the monment, something that happens without being set up. When I work with photographers sometimes, they take a hundred polaroids, and they have their assistant waiting with a clock, and. . . you know, just open it, for Christ’s sake, it’s not like we’re waiting for an X-Ray.”

HELENA Christensen has homes in Copenhagen, New York and Monaco, a mixture reflected in her accent. She says, however, that she doesn’t really live anywhere, something that concerns her as Mingus, her four-year-old son with the actor and model Norman Reedus, approaches school age.
  “Copenhagen is always going to be where I really feel like I’m at home,” she says. “But I still feel like I need to have a relationship with the other country that’s part of me [Christensen’s father is Danish, her mother Peruvian]. I used to go there a lot when I was little, and now I’m thinking I need to know about it as a grown-up.”
  Her immediate plans include opening a shop in New York, where she and a friend from Denmark will sell the “peculiar objects, old and weird things”, that she collects at antique markets. She shows me the morning’s haul from Nice’s flea market, half a dozen art deco brooches. “If the shop doesn’t work out,” she smiles, “the worst that happens is that we get stuck with a lot of old shit that we love.” Mostly, she wants to take pictures. She’s especially keen on the idea of doing reportage, but I wonder if that’s possible, if there is any reality that Helena Christensen can raise a lens at that isn’t instantly going to suck its stomach in, twirl its moustache, or just grin somewhat inanely.
  “Sometimes,” she concedes, “people act differently. But if I meet someone famous I’m intrigued by, or even that I don’t like, then I act differently as well. Famous people intimidate, and so other people act strangely. And beauty affects me when I see it – when I see someone that I find beautiful, I can’t stop looking, I get obsessed.”
  Nick Danziger arrives from Monaco to take some photographs, and he and Helena and Thalia and me wander into Nice in search of a location, and other people act strangely, get obsessed (Helena puts the dress back on for this, which is why you didn’t read the other week about Nice being gripped by rioting). Some stand and stare, some phone their friends, one man, looking backwards while walking forwards, performs the inevitable Laurel & Hardy punchline and falls over a bicycle. Helena seems utterly, guilelessly oblivious to all of this, as utterly and guilelessly oblivious as she earlier seemed to the fact that the internal monologue of any heterosexual male whom she asks for permission to remove her dress is going run along the lines of “hgggggnnnnnngggfffffffff”. A couple of bolder passers-by ask Helena if she’ll pose for photos with them; she does so with consummate and unforced grace, and delights several of them by photographing them with her camera.
  Even when she’s pestered for money by a tramp who clearly has little idea who he is, never mind who she is, her beatific smile fades not one watt; frankly, if the reeking old drunk had put his hand on my shoulder like that, I’d have immediately hired an agent and manager of my own, just so I could scream at them that they were fired, but Helena patiently endures his incoherent blather until he loses interest and staggers off. The armchair psychologist might surmise that guilt about the constant and reverent attention she attracts makes her feel bad about rejecting any of it, however malodorous. A more likely explanation, on first acquaintance, is that she’s just a remarkably good-humoured human being; certainly, no more than the standard uncertainties should be read into the following:
  “The whole thing with me,” she’d said earlier, “is. . . what is it I did that should earn this kind of reaction? I think maybe if I’d written a book, or done movies, or made records, performed in any sort of way, then there’s something that validates it. But if people just see photos of you, they’re just appreciating what is their idea of beauty. If you were born with a look and people react strangely to that, you don’t feel like you deserve it because it’s something that was there anyway. This exhibition is going to be the first time that I’m going to think it’s really cool if someone stops me and says they like what I did. Because I did this.”

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