Mark Borthwick

When we meet, it is fair to say Borthwick is picking up some…pieces. Divorced from fashion designer Maria Cornejo after more than three decades of marriage, he has left New York, where he raised his family after moving them there from Paris in 1996. And he is working very regularly again, after a spell of doing so more sporadically; in 2016, a campaign for Demna Gvasalia’s Balenciaga was the first he had shot for a major house in decades, and it reminded us just how modern his work always had been. A less specific but just as impactful event, as he cites it, was turning 60, which he did just after the Covid pandemic (Borthwick is now 62). This is the scenario in which I find the photographer, in a reflective mood, sitting on the patio of his new adopted home in Portugal in early December.

The decision to settle here – in a white, one-floor home set on a peak above acres of farmland a couple of hours inland from Lisbon – derived from something between chance and advisement, magic and rich-person banality. It was a dream “handed by the spirit” after an astrological advisor in upstate New York told him to move here; it was, at the same time, an Airbnb his daughter saw online that he bought outright a month later. The more we speak, the more it emerges that Borthwick is both good at talking about himself (unusual in fashion photographers) and aware of his many contradictions (more unusual still). More than that, he takes pleasure in his words and the inconsistencies that may lie in wait inside them. Only someone who appreciates words this much could be so good at, on occasion, making them up altogether. In fact, given that he has always written poetry, made and performed music and prepared elaborate meals as well as taken photographs, the best way to thread Borthwick’s various creative affiliations might be: rhythmic.

But for someone who evidently adores words this much, very few have been printed directly from his mouth. Known for his great influence on generations of creatives, Mark Borthwick has nevertheless rarely given interviews. The photographs in circulation trace his journey as an artist, but it would be a fool’s mission to try to employ those images to trace the life of the man, especially given the arena of branded advertising and fashion in which Borthwick has primarily worked.

This is by no means the first time Borthwick has been entreated to gather together his decades of work; the kind refusal has long been a familiar refrain. “I’m not a wanting person,” he says. “I feel good about so many things that I don’t need to go out and look for something to stimulate me. I’ve lived in that place all my life.” A few times over two days he will describe various feats of evasion: ducking and diving from gallerists, museum curators, stylists, magazine editors. But he’ll also describe the times he said yes with glee. Borthwick has to be the only fashion photographer, living or deceased, to describe a brand event with the genuine fondness of a friendly alien taking it all in (it was a Balenciaga party a few years back, in Paris; he loved staring at the young crowd’s wild outfits in the smoking area).

Another contradiction Borthwick will readily admit to: being a hermit who loves people. But his tendency to retreat – hard to believe, he’s such a wonderful host – derives from more serious reasons, as will draw focus later into our first night.

“I’ve been having these moments when I see myself as a ten-year-old, or a 15-year-old, or a 30-year-old, or a 60-year-old, and so on,” says the photographer when we sit for one of many conversations over his highly organic, Michelin-plated home cooking. “Then having so much gratitude for my life that brought me here, never knowing that I would land here.” There is something spry about Borthwick that makes imagining the ten-year-old quite easy: small and tanned, he certainly looks younger than his years. Sprite-like, he ricochets up and down between patio and house throughout our chat to check on various boiling pots or to try and find a book he mentions; his constant animation is closely tied to how one forms an impression of his looks. Borthwick’s current uniform consists of a low-cut cotton pirate shirt, a shawl-collared cable-knit, eclectic jewellery; his stripy sailor-like pants are haphazardly tucked into worn brown Chelsea boots. It might be the swashbuckling clothes and glittering, dark-rimmed gaze, but Borthwick sometimes brings to mind a romantic silent-movie action hero: Errol Flynn sans pomade. His face is long and his eyes are Wicked green.

In his new home, housekeeper popping in and out of scene (“Christina! Hel-lo!), over these two days Borthwick cooks in his earthy kitchen, shows me some photographs and talks about his life.

César’s question is in many ways a fair one. There are certain facts about Borthwick online. Certainly, there is the generic bio of a fashion photographer who, despite his protestations, air of mystery and admittedly incorrect published date of birth, has agency representation and is travelling to New York the following Sunday to shoot campaign imagery for The Row (“Mary-Kate and Ashley! Hee-hee. I mean, I don’t know what it is”).

Unlike the peers whose work he is known for documenting – Maison Martin Margiela in its original iteration, fashion label-meets-longitudinal art project Bless, Bernadette Corporation, Hussein Chalayan, Susan Cianciolo – Borthwick has a kind of anonymity that has never prompted the anxious speculation of, say, a New York Times pseudo-profile titled ‘Looking for…’ or long and obsessive Reddit threads. Yet his photographs have travelled: editorials he shot throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s for then fledgling magazines like Elein Fleiss and Olivier Zahm’s ‘Purple’, ‘Self Service’ and ‘AnOther’, as well as ‘i-D’ (primarily working with Jane How, with whom he is still close) and ‘Vogue Italia’ under the late Franca Sozzani live online everywhere from The Fashion Spot to Instagram saved folders. But despite traversing fashion’s indie and major leagues for decades, the name Mark Borthwick is still, outside the industry, more a case of “if you know, you know.” (When I tell friends before and after the trip who I am interviewing, responses vary on a spectrum from utter blankness to low-lying dropped jaws.)

The thing is, you have seen these photos. The women – nearly always they are women – have clarity. They bend, stretch, and spin. There is a groundedness: ballerinas with two feet firmly planted, never dainty dolls who float. Sometimes glowing lights flash and hover about their heads; no wonder the women are constantly threatening to jump out of frame, the lights are so hot and bright. But they come back. It is not so important to know if we are inside or outside, only if we are in the city (bleached-out blankness) or in nature (maximum colour exposure). Garments are worn, as the law of the fashion image ordains, but they are always moving: draped, taken apart, made alien. They come on and off; they are usually somewhere between being worn and being discarded. (Borthwick has to be the only photographer who has understood how Rei Kawakubo’s sculptural “lumps and bumps” should be shot: hills of blue, grimy kitchen cabinet.) Whoever takes these photographs hasn’t added anything to what he sees; if anything, he’s subtracted. There might be a plant or a chair: objects, not set design. The presence of a plastic coffee cup in a hunchbacked model’s hands in one 2016 Balenciaga campaign shot says a lot about the way an everyday object asserts itself in a Mark Borthwick fashion image. Another way you’ll know a photograph on the page to be Borthwick’s: the poetry and ink splashes that are the artist’s inscription.

An irrepressible troubadour, Borthwick is preceded by his reputation for speaking in long, Whitmanesque riddles (accidentally discovering his daughter’s school copy of ‘Leaves of Grass’ was a very important moment, I was not entirely surprised to hear). But as we get into it – sun at the back of my head and, though he doesn’t seem to mind, right in his eyes – the photographer readily answers straightforward queries as well as existential ones.

Borthwick’s mother was the sun where his dad was a cloud – and that’s not writerly whimsy but the terms with which Borthwick himself compares them. Born half deaf in one ear and subject to various operations as a young child, Borthwick was eventually diagnosed with dyslexia; his closeness with his mother came, in part, from her seeing the potential creativity in that. “To have that disability was also an ability to see things in a different way,” he says now. “My father always took it the wrong way, but my mum always gifted me that.” I’m curious, given that he went on to document femininity with such sensitivity – imaging the actual woman, not generalised “woman” – what the essence of his mother’s style might have been. “She was shockingly beautiful, incredibly elegant, and very French,” he says. “We’re blessed by our mothers. I can’t talk for all the daughters in the world; it’s a different relationship.”

If father and mother seemed diametrically opposed, this is how Borthwick talks about the entire scene of his youth: a cruel father equalled boarding school, England, bleakness and dark; a kind mother was summer holidays, the South of France and an escape into lightness. When I point out how extreme these two shaping forces seem to be in his remembrance, Borthwick agrees. “They’re polar opposites, but that’s no different from trying to define a difference between what’s good and bad. Knowing that they’re consequently one and the same.”

Unlike his distant father, who “lost his early adulthood to the war,” Borthwick was born at the beating heart of a new youth revolution: Chelsea and the King’s Road in the 1960s. But by the time he came of age the channel for that rebellion was the burgeoning New Romantic scene. “One has to remember that this was the time of Thatcher and [the Troubles],” he says. “There was a reaction to so many things that were worth reacting to.” Resplendent in his billowing white shirt and necklaces – I don’t think he’s wearing eyeliner these days, but the glint feels kohl-rimmed nonetheless – it’s easy to imagine Borthwick in the regalia of the New Romantics; he cites Club for Heroes, Mud Club, Blitz, the Wag and Steve Strange and Rusty Egan’s night at the Camden Palace as his most frequented clubs. Like many men who play with ideas of femininity in their creative lives, he may have taken that glamorous mother as subconscious inspiration.

“That’s the only place I know to come from: that feminine gaze,” Borthwick says. “Mother Nature is god. And everything comes from that. That’s a beautiful feeling. You don’t have to pay attention to what you’ve allowed to stand in your way.” For Borthwick that seems to have been his dad; it was a rejection of his real self that would have repercussions later. “[My relationship with my parents] paints a very detailed, intricate image of myself as a New Romantic,” he says. “Where I was finally allowing space to express myself and to be myself.” For him, as for many working in fashion today, a youth spent embedded in club culture unlocked something: a doorway to being “naughty,” admittedly, but also to make-up artistry. “I became a make-up artist because it was fun,” he says simply, “as a form of expression – to wake up every day and the first thing you think about over six years is ‘Whose is this face? Who do you want to be today?’ We create masks when we’re young, and I don’t think we know why at the time.”

Borthwick’s mother died in 2019, after an illness; it’s a time Borthwick remembers with difficulty. One of his books, ‘1978’ (published in 1997), features notes written by a 16-year-old Mark alongside an instantly familiar portrait series of the late Stella Tennant pulling funny faces. “My mother would always collect all my doodles and all my poems and put them in shoe boxes labelled by year. She found 1978 and gave it to me. Wow. They were so innocent and childlike, and so the opposite of where I was at that time.”

I get the impression that Borthwick’s longtime habit of declining to share work has in large part derived from this essential prioritising of family: for example, he pulled out of involvement in the 2018 Margiela exhibition at the Palais Galliera, despite boxes and boxes of documentation he would have been able to contribute, because it was around that time that his mother fell ill and needed care. A focus on the domestic – raising his own children with Maria, caring for his mother – is in part why we know Borthwick’s photos so well and also really don’t. But it’s not the whole story.

The early works displayed in the forthcoming Rizzoli book, in which every photograph is black and white, fill in some context on what made Borthwick excited to see people through that camera lens. It all began, really, with some of his self-described naughtiness, and the kind of mélange of influences that any self-respecting young artiste who moves to Paris on a dime in his early twenties will likely draw from.

“I was reading a lot of Baudelaire at the time,” Borthwick admits. “I met this French girl who introduced me to Guy Debord and the Situationists. This notion of dériver – to walk with no direction, get lost and just go – really inspired me. Also, I was doing a lot of speed.”

Amid this heady chemical and literary atmosphere, the young Borthwick would walk around with his camera. “I’d take my camera out of the club in the wee hours and just walk for two or three days,” he says. Like Leonard Bast’s grey dawn, however, the results of these perambulations disappointed him greatly. The problem was Brassaï. “I had been to see this exhibition, Paris by night in the ’20s, and I was completely blown away,” he recalls. “Then I developed my own pictures and realised they all existed already. That really shocked me.

“I was so excited by this medium of photography. But I didn’t even know what it was yet. I was just excited that I was excited about something.” The answer was to keep walking until something new smacked him in the face – the Périphérique. His photos taken in the banlieues are in the ‘Out of Date’ book: landscape photographs of concrete fortresses, shot close-to with a dissecting architectural eye; and, from a distance, skyscrapers that appear drenched in fog, as ancient as the pyramids, even from the side of the motorway. But there are also people: captured from a careful distance, old ladies carry plastic shopping bags; a smartly dressed African couple stand mysteriously apart at a zebra crossing; skinny kids appear in summer clothes, engrossed in private dramas rather than the camera. Through Borthwick’s lightly speckled, monochrome lens, the era in which he came across any of these subjects feels marvellously unknowable.

The Paris photos from this early period are surprising. Borthwick is, after all, not a photographer one readily associates with work of the street in the vein of a Winogrand or a Shore, or even, as his first sensation of imposter syndrome foreshadowed, a Brassaï. It’s interesting, I think, that Borthwick truly began here, with a space that was completely other to his own experience. Entering spaces where he was not necessarily invited – one imagines him as a genie who pops up when you least expect him because you accidentally called him into being – became a theme in Borthwick’s developing style.

He ended up documenting the Martha Graham company, for instance, after seeing a poster for a forthcoming show, despite not knowing who the famed choreographer was. “I found myself in the wings, so stoned. I even climbed up to do aerial pictures. I sent the photographs to my mum, and to the Martha Graham company.” (The company sent him back a letter and invited him to keep documenting the troupe.) Borthwick’s photographs of dancers from this period – like the playful and energetic ones of a ballet dancer hovering like a bird – place his ongoing preoccupation with gesture, in the dailiness of dressing and all its little dances, in a new contextual light.

Maybe Borthwick was always operating on the outside, even when he was inside. Part of the pleasure of ‘Out of Date’ for readers will be seeing the extra shots from the rolls of much-Tumblred photographs, as well as everything else previously unseen and unknown, like the banlieue shots and the personal images of his two children, Bibi, herself now a photographer, and Jo-kel, a creative director (they are both based in London). While Borthwick’s camera has interfaced with many notable names (Sofia Coppola, Sinéad O’Connor, Björk, Kim Gordon, to name a few), it feels like an act of deflation to ask him about them in the traditional way, to say “What was it like working with her?” That’s not only because he evidently fosters a connection with his subjects, usually photographing them more than once. If the shared qualities of Borthwick’s portraits of women are repetitious – light leaks, starkly pale backdrops, overexposure, limbs which move in and out of frame – it’s true to say that this iteration also performs a kind of levelling.

He remembers that famous shoot on the beach with Chloë Sevigny, who after all wasn’t really famous yet. It has all the elements of iconicity: her strawberry-blonde bowl cut, Peter Pan-collared shirt and teenage-boy-Y-fronts-meet-swimsuit are so very Chloë, but also so Mark. Borthwick first met Sevigny outside Liquid Sky, the rave-scene fashion store co-founded by Mary Frey. The much-circulated shots were placed in ‘i-D’ for a feature on the film ‘Kids’; ‘Out of Date’ reveals the wider series of her, Frey and artist Rita Ackermann messing around and drinking beers together on Coney Island. “I love that day,” Mark remembers. “That’s the spirit of these ingenious women.”

But Borthwick is also at pains to remind me that fashion models and ingenues were never his primary subjects. “If it’s very true to say that 90 per cent of my photography’s never been seen, it’s also very true to say that 90 per cent is nature.” Anyone interested in Borthwick’s work knows that the photographer likes plants. In the indelible series of photographs for Maison Martin Margiela that were first collected in the book ‘2000-1’, models like a barefaced Stella Tennant and his other prepossessing muse, Hélène Fillières – Borthwick has always appreciated strong faces over dainty dolls – sit next to or stand naked behind potted houseplants. Still, even Borthwick can’t deny that he did take photographs of models and ingenues, and that they have stood the test of time.

“The camera is a toy. It’s a game,” he says when pressed. “It’s a very generous tool that allows things to happen. It’s the mirror of what you see, and through it we can go one step deeper. I said that a few times in the last hour, right? It’s going two, three steps deeper.”

It’s tempting to interpret Borthwick’s wavering as a classic case of the artist de-emphasising their fashion work. But the photographer only downplays this side of his career because if there is magic there, it’s in the not knowing. “We’re talking about something that’s so pure, so simple, because it comes from an unknown. It has a language of its own. And that’s really soft. It’s the opposite of trying to find something, or looking for something. It’s naivety.”

But even as Mark denies control of his own camera – for one thing, he says, he rarely looks through the lens at all – it’s clear that he is lately asking a question of himself rather than the photographs: why has he been unable to take ownership of this vast, unique body of work in the way friends, family and – somewhere inside – he himself know he deserves? “I don’t want to give too much importance to something that I’m not giving importance to in the first place. And yet that’s an interesting question that you come to ask yourself at a certain point. Why am I not?”

Borthwick met Martin Margiela after they had followed one another’s work from afar and a mutual friend introduced them. “I admired Mark’s work in fashion magazines before I met him,” Margiela wrote over email. “I loved his vision, his casting and the fact that in his fashion photography the women were always central.” He also cited the instinct and immediacy of Borthwick’s shooting style – one could say the blur. “I liked how he captured the moment, almost like in the reportage photography I am so fond of.”

For Borthwick, theirs was a collaboration that took both official and unofficial forms. Officially, he partnered with the house in documenting the collections and in other ways. When Margiela was heading up both MMM and Hermès at the time of the AW 98 collection, the two shows were on consecutive days, and Borthwick, Jane How and Sydney Picasso stepped in to come up with the presentation for the designer’s own label, with Margiela stuck in prep for his Hermès collection. “Mark filmed women wearing the clothes, accompanied with a booklet of photographs,” Margiela recalled of the show. “Jane styled the outfits on moving life-size puppets, and Sydney had texts printed on cotton ribbons to be tied around the audience’s wrists.”

But he also shot the label’s garments through sheer force of will – often where they were not wanted. “I would turn up on a ‘Vogue Italia’ shoot with bags of Margiela clothes, and they would say, ‘No, Mark, we have to shoot this,’” Borthwick recalls. “But I tapped in really quickly: okay, the photos don’t get published in the magazine – you still took them.”

Borthwick’s recollections remind us of one of the conditions for the establishment of a true avant-garde: mischief. Such stories are far away from the way we interface with the era today, through po-faced archival stores and glass cases. It was all a lot more off-the-cuff than that. But amid this spontaneity, when shows were being produced with such a guerrilla spirit, one photographer was actually keeping pace and chronicling what was happening. “The designers and the friends that I was working with and collaborating with weren’t yet that immersed in fashion,” Borthwick emphasises. “Margiela and Bless and Bernadette Corporation was the heart of collaboration. Collaborating – that was everything.”

Ines Kaag and Desiree Heiss, whose interdisciplinary design studio, Bless, anticipated our present-day concept of the lifestyle brand in the same way Borthwick anticipated what we now understand as lifestyle photography, first encountered his work through ‘Purple’ co-founder Elein Fleiss and the Japanese fashion editor Nakako Hayashi. For the Bless duo, Borthwick’s spontaneous approach results in completely unexpected pictures – and necessitates a certain amount of letting go on the part of the designers, to see what he cooks up with the available ingredients. Over email they recalled one particular shoot, for their N°18 collection. “We presented in Milan under very heavy rain, but [Mark] made the models play football on the muddy field. He trashed the collection’s hybrid espadrille-sneakers that we were so proud of. The pictures looked so beautiful, and today we are very grateful for them. Back then we were quite mad.”

It’s a story that speaks to the going-with-the-dance nature of working with Borthwick. “Meeting with Mark is intense,” Kaag and Heiss told me. “It can be exhausting too, but never unnecessary or boring.”

One of the best examples of Mark’s approach to garments, bodies, shapes – in which he took the ethos of what, say, Bless and Margiela were doing and propelled that somewhere uniquely his own – was a project with Aaron Rose’s Alleged Gallery, ‘All Events Are Even’, that took place in 2001. The event actually began life as a series with Sevigny that appeared in ‘Purple’ SS 00; in snapshot sequence, the actress dons oversized and undersized Margiela pieces, which pile up haphazardly on the floor. Using that experiment as inspiration, Borthwick formed the gallery installation. “I thought, ‘What if I send an email to designers and say that I’m going to do a fashion show in the gallery but I don’t tell them what I’m going to do?’ They sent the clothes, and I built this mountain.”

He continues: “We had these different slots throughout the day. And people would come in, choose something, and then I would either style it on them or they would do it themselves. Just mix and match. In the studio in the back, I documented it all.” The photographs, in which individuals and groups of all ages stand for Borthwick’s camera in something between conscious pose and unconscious attitude, are simple in isolation; in sequence, they coin a language. Page to page, it is a narration about stages in life and how our identity takes shape through dress. The conclusion to that narrative – all those people, all those layers – is decidedly the photograph of all the clothes piled up outside the front door of the gallery. In our present era of fashion’s endless landfills, the image registers with foreboding familiarity.

The photographs from the event appear in a 2002 book published by Purple Books for the Dutch gallery Mu. Borthwick sequenced them with images including shots of Guerrisol secondhand clothing bins round the corner from the Margiela office and photographs taken of trash in his own neighbourhood when he still lived in Chelsea, then still a wasteland, “before the galleries moved in.”

It’s a cryptic combination of sources that says a lot about the manner in which Borthwick, before this present desire to organise his archive, has shared his photographs. No project or series can ever be taken at face value; photographs published in one place or taken in one context will have since been remixed and republished, often by Borthwick personally, so the same photograph will appear in multiple places without explanation or identification. (He tells me he once made versions of the same book to three different sets of specifications for Japan, Paris and the UK without any of the publishers knowing about the others’ existence.) This tendency is most famously represented by the photocopied “newspaper” variations: ‘Social Documentaries Amid This Pist’, the Margiela book, ‘Synthetic Voices’ and ‘1978’ were all remade in Xerox form (‘Synthetic Voices’ is even rephotographed to smaller dimensions, like a greyscale trompe-l’oeil of the original book).

But if Borthwick’s methods of dissemination have been haphazard, and often downright obfuscating, it’s entirely intentional, even essential. The photographer cites print culture in Japan – a country that has always taken an interest in and given a sympathetic home to his projects – as informing this democratising impulse. “In Japan I understood really clearly that it was the kids who were the fans of my work, and that they wanted a little piece of me. I thought, ‘I’m just gonna make things that don’t cost anything.’ I’d make CDs, zines, T-shirts, pins.”

The project at Alleged Gallery also represented a certain lighting-of-the-match moment for Borthwick with respect to fashion, garments, his career. What began with on-set infractions – shooting his friends’ designs over advertisers’, playing magazines off each other – had eventually led to a deeper questioning of, well, all of it. In the photographs made at the gallery, what begins as innocent dress-up eventually morphs into heaps of clothing dumped together so as to become unrecognisable. Eventually, the clothes overwhelm the humans – just as they did Borthwick. It illustrates what he wrote in ‘Artforum’ in 2016: “Fashion was just a question. I never wanted it to be an answer.”

A few years ago, Borthwick was mugged and beaten in Mexico. His daughter found him “half-dead.” The event triggered something and compounded his already hermetic tendencies. Borthwick went from spending a lot of time at home to spending all his time there. “I couldn’t go to the market. I couldn’t go to a busy place. I couldn’t get on the train. I had a hard time going outside.” A therapist suggested antidepressant medication, which had adverse effects. “It made me suicidal three years later. I was in a real mess.” His mother became ill; his marriage was under strain. “Something had to change.” The teenage Bibi, who had started working with him and learning his trade, had an idea: “Dad, have you ever thought about doing ayahuasca?” She had been reading online about its beneficial effects.

After an invitation to take some pictures in Brazil, Borthwick soon had the opportunity. Soon after the separation was confirmed, his mother passed away, and he adopted a routine of travelling back and forth first to Brazil and then more regularly to Ecuador, journeying deeper and deeper into practising plant medicine.

It was an experience different from any he’d had before. First, it provided a community separate from the intertwined friendship group that wound around his 30-year marriage. (As anyone who has broken up will know, always the most difficult part.) “It was a gift,” he says of the group with whom he delved into what would become seven years of intensive practice. “A safe haven.”

One trip especially provided a new, though hard-won, clarity for Borthwick. The experience began, as usual, with a hike lasting a few days, during which the shaman encouraged each member of the group to leave their stories behind, to give them up to the jungle, emptying themselves for the trip. “So I’m walking, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh fuck, what am I going to do with all this stuff?’” That night in his tent the dreams came: past selves, difficult childhood memories of his father. He was living through them all again. “Everything was coming up.”

Then the dream changed shape. “Someone had a machete, and they were cutting off all my branches. And I’m feeling that I’m shedding everything. I can feel every single story that’s just been fucking with my head, and I’m just letting it go.” After he woke up, the group gathered collectively in the palapa, and the shaman correctly told each of them the dreams they had had.

At this point in Borthwick’s story, it’s late on our first evening together, and the tall candlesticks on the coffee table are periodically shedding wax. The room is large, of earthy stone, and everything around us is quiet as he speaks at the other end of a very large sofa. The room looks very big, and Borthwick looks very small. It’s not lost on me that the conditions are perfect for such a tale.

After a swim and another hike – the idea is to deplete the body’s reserves before the trip – Borthwick drank the ayahuasca tea while their shaman performed a tobacco ceremony. At first, as with any drug, it felt like nothing was happening. Then he lay down once more. “All of a sudden my spirit is, like, ‘Who am I?’ And I’m, like, ‘Huh?’ Then my spirit, for the next two hours, showers me in all my work. Not my fashion work, but all my light work. You have to remember that ayahuasca really just wants you to see yourself at the beginning.” Borthwick’s long, guitar-playing fingernails scrape the weave of the sofa. “After maybe three or four times of doing it, it starts bringing up all the things that you really need to do. But the first two or three times it really just shows you your spirit. It shows you the purity of love itself, and the beauty of everything that you are. It just wants you to see yourself in all the glory of who you are. That’s it. And it’s extraordinary.”

After this vision, on his way back to his bed, Borthwick opened up the back of his camera to face the full moon, knowing very well that if you open it up the resulting image turns red. After taking some photographs, he slept again. The next day, he took some more on the same roll of film. Back in the US, he developed it.

“The thing is, a spirit came in my camera,” he says, “and left all these traces. It burnt through all my film.” He shows me one image of a thatched-roof house in a verdant setting, with four pale-green light leaks around the base of the building. Borthwick made a “tiny little book,” as he usually does, and brought the photographs to the jungle next time. What did the shaman think when he saw them? “He looked at me and said: ‘You see? You see? It’s real. It’s real.’”

Borthwick says that once upstate he even caught some playful little angels on his iPhone. All his talk of spirits and angels appearing in photographs could verge on feeling a little Cottingley Fairies. But his interpretation of his own work goes back to the very earliest days of photography and, in a sense, the source of the photographic impulse itself. In Victorian times, one of the earliest popular forms of the technology was “spirit photography,” produced through the long exposures necessitated by the earliest cameras. Photography has long been the technology through which we have argued about trace: what the trace evidences, how it ensorcels us. In that context, what Borthwick describes doesn’t seem so far-fetched. As he puts it: “These lights are just in the right place.”

Over the course of my two days with Borthwick we talk a lot about narratives: the ones which serve us, and the ones which don’t, too. What’s more, at different moments Borthwick points out certain stories and connections that he likes, almost as if he is co-writing this article with me. “I just wanted to be seen by my father; he was the only person I wanted to be heard by and seen by,” he says, almost in conclusion to an unwritten piece before him. “But he was the one person who would never listen, and the one person who looked at me with the wrong eyes. I bring that little boy with me everywhere.”

I find myself seduced by Borthwick’s narrativising, the connections he draws. It’s his life, after all. But as he emerges from his difficult experiences to lay the foundations of a new home – via the Amazonian jungle – he strikes me, most of all, as someone at long last taking possession of the photographs he has made – and taking possession of himself.

“I remember having this one conversation with a friend, who told me I was an artist. They said, ‘You have this gift. All these magazines want to give you pages, and you can do whatever you want.’ That was true. And that same friend said: ‘If you’re an artist and you do a gallery show, you can guarantee a little feature and that’s it. But here you are – you’re doing your art across ten pages, 20 pages.’ I remember thinking about the power of that.”

It’s not that Borthwick has broken down all other narratives and found, ultimately, truth in his current one. But if a light leak – a dream – might bring you to a place of seeing the value of what you’ve brought into the world, and by extension yourself, even a cynic has to wonder how that could ever be seen as anything but important.

Maybe a Mark Borthwick image is best thought of as just that: an afterimage.