Richard Young, photographer

·50 min·4 clips

Elizabeth Taylor screamed at Richard Young to leave her party, but his photos went global overnight.

Richard Young comes in with a lot stored up. Lauren Laverne introduces him as the photographer once called the king of the paparazzi, now running a Kensington gallery and sitting on an archive of millions of images. The early story is about getting in. He goes from sneaking into Elizabeth Taylor's party to being in rooms linked with Vanity Fair, the Golden Globes and Sir Elton John. The episode cares about celebrity, but it spends more time on access: chance, nerve, persistence, and being invited back after you somehow made it through the door. Then Stevie comes back through sound. Richard remembers walking into a hotel room years after they first met and being recognized by voice alone. Lauren catches the sweetness of it and lets the story sit for a moment before moving him to his fourth disc, Bob Dylan's Positively, Fourth Street. The track gives Richard a neat sideways route into the fact that he later lived close to Fourth Street. London picks the story up in 1974. Laverne places him in a Regent Street bookshop, where the owner started sending him out with a camera before Richard even had one. His first assignment was a mess. Sent to photograph Thomas Hardy's Wessex country near Dorchester, he came back with two rolls of blank film and an embarrassed explanation. The owner gave him six weeks to learn the camera or lose the job. Brisk, but useful. What could have ended there becomes the start of the work that carries the next fifty years. The episode closes back in BBC mode, with credits, the next castaway and a Screenshot trailer after a story built on accident, access and apprenticeship.

As heard by us

A warm, brisk portrait of Richard Young, from blank film and borrowed gear to life behind the velvet rope.

Richard Young's Desert Island Discs episode has the pleasing shape of a self-made career told through mishap as much as glamour. Lauren Laverne introduces him as the working-class Londoner who left school at 14, borrowed a camera and worked his way from sneaking into Elizabeth…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Hear a working-class London photographer go from blank film to the celebrity rooms he once shot from outside.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Desert Island Discs