For over 20 years, Horton-Stephens has been a leading force in London’s photography and motion production scene. With a legacy that spans iconic shoots and collaborations with A-list stars like Samuel L. Jackson and Robert De Niro, the agency’s success lies in its unwavering commitment to excellence and taking each job like it would be their last.
In this exclusive interview, we spoke with Niall Horton-Stephens, the founder of Horton-Stephens, who shares the key ingredients behind the agency’s longevity, his thoughts on the future of the industry—including the rise of AI—and what it takes to stand out as a creative in today’s competitive landscape.
You have been in the industry for a long time. Can you share a bit about how the agency started and evolved over the years?
Hah, yes, quite a few years, and our core office team has remained the same throughout. We worked out recently that we have more than a century of experience between us. Oh dear, that makes us sound ancient, but in answer to your question, the agency changes every year, evolving to reflect the landscape of our clients’ needs. Changes we have seen? We no longer use fax machines on a daily basis, working on actual film is a rare treat, and like Moore’s law that states computing power will double in size every two years, pre-production briefing documents double in length at the same rate (current record stands at 289 pages). We do have many constants too though… the creative industry still strives to deliver excellence and effective communication has always been a complex and subtle thing. As pre-production on projects gets more and more detailed, we find ourselves working ever closer with creative agency colleagues as levels and durations of collaboration increase and we love to become embedded in the agency team at the earliest possible juncture.
What do you think has been the key to maintaining your position as London's leading photographers' agents for so long?
Never forgetting that our last job, might be our last job! Our industry is a very small world and the reason that clients gravitate towards us is that they know that failure on any level is not an option for us. They come knowing that the pressure placed on us to deliver excellence is all consuming and that we fully understand that our continued existence is due solely to our absolute dependability. Clients don’t necessarily get that working with a lone talent who is less invested.
Can you highlight some of the differences in approach when working on still photography versus moving image projects?
The essence of it is the same. Planning, production, patience! It is interesting though, how readily most of our photographers have become directors. They have an attention to detail that sometimes directors without a stills background lack. However, motion offers freedoms that stills do not. Rarely is a single frame of motion scrutinised and that motion frame rarely has to contain every facet of the message that we need to deliver. By that I mean that a stills image has to convey, in that one image, a sometime complex set of visual messages, maybe an action and a consequence, maybe a reward and a reaction. With motion we can cut to and from points of view and scene to scene to create a narrative and this presents whole new opportunities. For a stills photographer, this huge new scope is a daunting task to employ fruitfully, but one of our great pleasures has been seeing our photographers adopting motion techniques and blossoming into fully-fledged directors.
The Warburtons films featuring Samuel L. Jackson have garnered a lot of attention. Can you share any interesting behind-the-scenes stories from that shoot?
Unfortunately, the greater they are, the more professional and easier to work with too, so when we shot Samuel L. Jackson, he was incredibly attentive and understood direction in an instant. It was the same with other Warburtons work we did with De Niro and Stallone. All absolute stars and couldn’t have been nicer to work with, even though every second allowed with them was timed with a stopwatch. Gerard Butler, a star too, but when we shot him, the TVC had had him dangling in an increasingly constricted harness so long, that it tried his good humour, stills got the thin end of the wedge and out came the publicist’s stopwatch. Same with some of the sports stars we’ve worked with. Vettel and Hamilton, knew exactly what we needed to do, but a publicist on hand gave us maybe 120 seconds with them and that was it! Vroom! At the other end of the spectrum, we’ve worked with some very unfunny comedians that were no joke and some absolute Z-listers that thought that during their 120 seconds of fame, they should be treated with more deference than that due to the A-Listers. Insecurity in front of the camera takes many forms!
Great production is key to your success. Can you walk us through your typical production process from start to finish?
I don’t believe that there is a typical production! Each one is different and a production always takes place in the style of the photographer that our client has chosen to get involved. Some of our photographers are chosen because they work in a very production-lite way. Marco Mori’s latest campaign for West Midlands Buses is, in that sense, a dream brief. Armed with little more than a camera, model releases and his own personal charm, he approached everyday bus passengers to produce over 15 executions! That can be interesting and refreshing, but it requires a client that has bought into a methodology where most shoot details appear from nowhere, unpredictably, and that provides a spontaneous result which often equates to authenticity. Conversely, some of our photographers are chosen because of their production attention to detail / excellence. On these occasions, every aspect of the shoot is planned, discussed and approved beforehand, and here the challenge becomes controlling all the elements as agreed, but without getting a result that looks contrived or unbelievable. Both methods work, and the first thing in the process that we like to do is to understand our client’s preferences and appetite for anything that is not predetermined! I think our own skill is to be a transparent conduit for our artists’ approach, whilst using our experience to navigate the trapdoors that can lie in wait.
How do you foresee the role of CGI / AI and post-production evolving in your projects?
From the word go, we considered CGI to be a photographer’s tool and ultimately a friend to the shoots we were handling. I think we were the first photographic agents anywhere to represent CG artists back in around 2002, when we created “Um” as a CGI entity with Act Two and whilst many in the industry thought CGI would be the end of photography, we thought it could take photography, in certain spheres, on to new heights… and I believe it did. The new battlefield of course is AI and that’s a very different beast. Friend or foe? Undoubtedly both, but not in equal measure. We are trying to see how we can use it and our Gary Salter, for instance, has been looking at workflows where we use AI for some otherwise unattainable element, like a complex set build that would be out of budget scope, and seeing how we can weave it with pure photography too. For instance, shooting actual human talent gives the image back some authenticity and allows us to work with real reactions and expressions and all the many nuances and surprises that a photoshoot provides, and it allows an agency creative the opportunity to steer their vision on shoot and play a full role in the image’s creation. AI is amazing for sure, but it is a tool that references the past and creates from that. I can never imagine AI creating concepts like the famous Tango ads for instance. Often the best acts of creation, be they words or images, contain an element that is in some way “wrong” and AI seems to miss that. Sadly, there are unimaginative clients out there that produce unimaginative work and for them AI may deliver. It's up to us as consumers to be discerning and to reject the paucity of such offerings.
What tip would you give to a photographer who is looking to get an agent?
Specialise and have a USP. Easier said than done, but the most fundamental and critical task is identifying what your chosen area of photography is as soon as you can and then build your folio on it. Maybe outside the city, being a jack of all trades is viable. In the city, to pursue the best commissions in any given genre, you must be a master of that area. Photographers continually question why they didn’t get a particular job, “because they could have done it” but the truth is that photographers get chosen when their whole folio shouts a single cohesive message, be that topic area or style. It’s not enough to have a couple of food shots that by chance turned out alright and expect a food shoot gig. The food client wants someone that shoots nothing but food and understands every aspect of it, reliably delivering and bringing their experience to the table. So yes, a folio full of what you have settled on is best. Show only the best work even if it means the folio is short. Remember that shots that you think add breadth, can also be tangents that take your folio off message and confuse the viewer. Oh, and don’t judge your own folio, get someone else to do it. As the photographer, you have too much baggage attached to the image to be objective.
Will there still be photographers’ agents in 10 years’ time?
That’s a good question. I still plan to be around in 10 years’ time, though the lines blur increasingly in terms of the product we deliver. We’re a generally resourceful bunch and we’ll continue to evolve to keep providing the essence of what we do, but it isn’t just photography, it’s stills and motion image creation and it uses all the latest tools, including AI, to deliver our artists’ vision. That’s what serious clients will continue to need and, in a world, wrapped up with NDAs, insurance and warranties, delivery specifications and contractual obligations, they will continue to seek the reassurance that working with a very well-established player brings. A lone operator can’t offer this. There’s a reason that we’ve produced well over 10,000 shoots; we deliver on brief, on time and on budget and our clients are right to rely and depend on that. It’s what we do and it separates us from many that appear briefly on the scene and disappear after a failed project or two. Sometimes a problem does surface and when it does, we’re defined by the way we react to it. Very recently, we completed a shoot to discover that a model had a history that conflicted with the client brand. Although we’d said that the client should make whatever background checks they require, our client relationship is paramount, so we didn’t even bother referring to this get-out clause. We re-grouped and all our very loyal team pulled together to reshoot within a matter of three days and we absorbed the cost. We could have been at loggerheads with the client, but instead we cemented our close relationship with them. Our ability to take this attitude is very much a facet of the close relationships we have with all the team we have production side. They’re the best in the business and we support each other to remain so.
You have been a member of Production Paradise for over 20 years. How has this relationship benefited your agency?
We’ve always thought we were good at self-publicity and from having one of the very first websites in our profession, we’ve always been active with SEO, digital newsletters, etc, but that only reaches known “targets”. The beauty of PP is that it casts our skills out in front of a far wider audience, to ad agencies in every corner of the globe and to many direct clients too. We simply haven’t got that reach ourselves, so for us PP is a wonderful partner, waving the flag, blowing our trumpet, here, there and everywhere!
We thank Niall Horton-Stephens for his time and insight! You can see more of their work on their Production Paradise member page and website.
