The man who's been photographed with 2,000 celebrities

The man who's been photographed with 2,000 celebrities

Over 23 years Richard Simpkin has collared more than 2,000 celebrities to have his picture taken with them. Why, asks Tim Dowling.

Tim Dowling
guardian.co.uk, Friday 25 November 2011 22.58 GMT


Richard Simpkin with Nelson Mandela in 1990. Photograph: Richard Simpkin

Let's select a picture at random, from among the massed ranks on the wall: it shows a smiling, frail-looking Audrey Hepburn, circa 1991, standing on the pavement with a young boy. It's poignant, because Hepburn is no longer with us and the boy, whoever he is, is no longer young. It has the quality of a minor artefact – lots of people, after all, met Hepburn – but from the boy's perspective it's evidence of a memorable moment, a close encounter with a star.

Now step back and look at it in context, along with the other 450-odd, 21cm x 14cm photographs hanging there. All the pictures show celebrities, from Nelson Mandela to Kim Kardashian, all of them posing with the same person: Australian photographer Richard Simpkin. Some of them look delighted, others bewildered. Woody Allen looks positively pissed off. The picture was taken in 2001 outside the Dorchester hotel in London where Simpkin had been waiting along with his girlfriend and a few other fans. "There was never a word exchanged between me and Woody Allen," Simpkin says. "But we got a photo."

That you may have never heard of Simpkin is partly the point. For 23 years, he has been getting his picture taken with the stars. The results can be seen in his exhibition, Richard & Famous, which has been shown in various galleries around the world. Why does he do it? Is it a comment on celebrity? On mortality? On our relationship to the former, in the context of the latter? "It's capturing your life," Simpkin says. "There it is, and there I was, part of it all."

Simpkin was only 15 when Bros came to Sydney in 1988. "Bros were huge in Australia," he says. Simpkin was in the habit of hanging around after rugby league matches to get the players' autographs. He was determined to do the same with Bros, but wasn't sure how to go about it. "I remember thinking, well, they have to stay in a hotel," he says. "So I said to my mum, can you drive me around, and we'll look for Bros." They went to all the top hotels, but by the time they arrived at the one where Bros were staying, the band had left. Simpkin was undeterred. When Poison arrived in Sydney some weeks later, he got a tip-off and headed for the Sebel Townhouse – a fading hotel favoured by rock bands.

"After about two or three days, I'd collected all four autographs on my Poison poster." When Kylie turned up at the Sebel Townhouse a week later, and Debbie Gibson a week after that, Simpkin was there. "I'd become almost like a celebrity at school. It was like, 'Who's Richard meeting next week?'"

Simpkin didn't think too hard about the point of it all – "I guess it was a way to become popular with the other kids" – and was content with his hobby until someone showed him something that convinced him he was wasting his time: an old snapshot of her dad with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the product of a chance encounter in New York's Central Park in the 70s.

"He captured something very special," Simpkin says. "I remember looking at it and thinking, what does an autograph mean? It's just a scribble. I want to get my photo taken with people who are going to be remembered in history."

Simpkin's obliging mother bought him a camera, and he set about pursuing his new goal. He quickly realised that if you wanted to be in a photo with a celebrity, you couldn't take the picture yourself. This means that Simpkin is to some extent neither the subject nor the author of his photographs, but there were more practical concerns. "You're trying to give your camera to a girl who's screaming and crying that Jon Bon Jovi, her idol, is standing in front of her," he says. "And you're like, 'Can you just take the photo, please?' And she's going, 'Nnyaaaahaaaaahahhhh!'"

At about this time, Simpkin met Michael Hutchence, after a friend's father pulled some strings to get the boys into the Sydney Opera House, where Hutchence's band INXS were rehearsing. The meeting would change both Simpkin's life and his view of celebrity. "I didn't know what charisma was," he says, "but Michael Hutchence was, and still is, one of the most charismatic people I've ever met." Simpkin left school at 16, despite his parents' misgivings, to spend five months with INXS while they recorded an album, hanging out and taking pictures. "If you've ever seen the movie Almost Famous, that kid in Almost Famous, my life was very similar for five months," he says. "I got to go to all the listening parties. The drummer John used to drop me home." Over time, Simpkin and Hutchence became friends. Eight years later, when Simpkin heard that the singer had been found dead in his hotel room, he was in the parking lot, waiting to drive Hutchence to a rehearsal.

It wasn't until five years after Simpkin got his camera that he looked back over his collection and noticed a few things. In the intervening period he'd gone through puberty, and his appearance had changed dramatically. Some of the legends with whom he'd been snapped were dead and gone. "I thought, 'I'm actually on to something here', and it changed from just a simple fan sort of thing into a project." At 20, he embarked on a career as a professional photographer, vastly improving his access to celebrities.

To date he has been snapped with more than 2,000 famous people, and over the years has developed a professional detachment. He sees that he gets to his celebrities, even if that means keeping his cool while fighting through a hundred-strong crowd of girls screaming because they've caught sight of Robert Pattinson ("I don't do that every time otherwise I'd be in a mental home"), or, where possible, thinking laterally. "Would he go to the zoo?" he says. "Would he go to the beach?" When he couldn't get near Keanu Reeves, he tracked him to the airport. "I'm always polite. There's a respect between me and the celebrity." But he couldn't control the elderly passerby he dragooned into taking the photo. "You look very grumpy," said the man to the actor. "I want a big smile out of you." Reeves didn't smile.

Simpkin began with the strict brief of having his picture taken with people who would be "remembered in history", but has fairly Catholic tastes when it comes to celebrity. His exhibition features Shirley MacLaine, Bob Dylan, Donald Bradman and the Dalai Lama, but also Milli Vanilli, Mischa Barton and Zac Efron. While he admits to having been occasionally starstruck in the past – particularly in the presence of Michael Jackson – the shallow waters of modern fame don't do much for the 38-year-old and he's beginning to feel out of touch. "When I go to Los Angeles, I let 50% walk past me. I don't know who they are."

Given the years he's put into fighting scrums of autograph hounds, the cheapness of modern celebrity, and the fact that his collection has resulted in a book and exhibition, does Simpkin ever consider calling time on his mission?

"It's an interesting question," he says. "I could stop this today, and Richard And Famous would be an interesting project for ever." At present, however, he has no plans to. "I'm obsessed with making the best exhibition I can."

• Richard & Famous is at the Open Eye gallery, Liverpool, from 13 January 2012-18 March 2012.

With Johnny Cash, 1991.

With Audrey Hepburn 1991

With Michael Jackson 1996

With Woody Allen 2001

With INXS 1989