Life through the Lens: How Philip Lee Harvey Takes Audiences to Secret New Worlds

Adventure is not a stranger to Philip Lee Harvey. In fact, it’s one of his oldest friends. Surrounded as a child by quintessentially British environs near Canterbury - a sprawling farm, a leafy forest, gently babbling streams - it didn’t take long for the young Philip to start pushing at the borders of his world. 

“My parents were a teacher and an art director - so there was always that link between my childhood and what I’ve ended up doing”, he reflects. “But primarily I just wanted to be outside. I wanted to ride a dirt bike through deserts and jungles, I buried my head in National Geographic magazines, and I was longing to see as much of the world as I could”. 

By any measure, the intrepid photographer has lived out that ambition. Philip, whose first retrospective is being shown this month at the Xposure Festival, has shot across countless cities and locations in every continent on the planet. And what’s most remarkable about his body of work - made up of projects for the worlds of commercials, entertainment, and lifestyle - is how life lives so authentically within his imagery. 

Above: Some of the images which will feature in Philip Lee Harvey’s retrospective this month at Xposure Festival. 

“My job is to encourage others to dream about far off places, fuel their escapism, and hope that they learn about different cultures and why we need to protect them”, he says. 

Whilst his eyes were always set on a life of exploration, it was only thanks to a surprising twist that Philip caught the photography bug on which his extraordinary career would later be built. “When I was 13 years old, I came down with tuberculosis”, he recalls. “It wasn’t life-threatening or anything like that, but it did scupper my plans to head out on an overseas trip which a group of my friends had planned. I was devastated not to be going, and my parents bought me my first camera as a kind of consolation prize”. 

Looking back, it’s easy to pinpoint that moment as the one from which everything else flowed. “I was lucky in that it was a genuinely great camera - a Nikon”, he recounts with a childlike glint of excitement in his eyes. “And that was the only invitation I needed”. 

In Search of Adventure 

Looking at Philip’s work and listening to him recount how he organically fell in love with photography, it’s easy to imagine that his was a kind of innate talent - one picked up in childhood which flowed naturally into a career. However, that would do a disservice to the work ethic and craft which has defined that career and turned him into a go-to creator for brands and travel publications alike. Behind it all, there’s a determined drive towards high standards - throughout our conversation, Philip strikes the image of a photographer and director who believes he is yet to shoot his best work. 

“There’s an image I took early in my career which I still use as a yardstick today”, he says. “It’s of a young boy, a Monk growing up in Ladakh, India. At the time I took it I had no idea it would be one I kept coming back to so often, but it has so many of the qualities that I look for: Simple composition, a minimal colour palette, and a kind of painterly aesthetic. Whenever I’m asked to give talks or conduct workshops on photography, this is the image I use as an example”. 

Above: This stunning image of a young boy growing up in Ladakh, India - a region otherwise famed for its jaw-dropping mountainscapes. 

In a sense, this leads into another recurring theme from Philip’s work - a desire to go beyond the obvious. “I like going to places that make you dream”, he says, “that make you stop and ask ‘where am I?’. It doesn’t need to be surreal, but being intentional and imaginative is the only way to immerse a viewer in a place or a feeling”. 

As a result, Philip is always keen to immerse himself in a project and discover as much as possible about a place. “There’s a job I went on in Casablanca, where I wanted to get an image of a mosque. But it was only upon arriving that it became clear to me how the mosques were more than places of worship - they were meeting places, too”. 

Building on that observation, Philip set out to capture the complexity of the mosque’s place in the community through his photography. “What I ended up doing was taking a picture of a young girl flying past the front of an enormous golden Islamic door on a scooter”, he says. “I realised, yes I could simply shoot the mosque, but I’d be doing it a disservice by omitting that part of its communal role”. 

Above: Reflecting on this image, Philip recalls that “this was taken at a time where there was a lot of heat around the idea of Islam in the Western world - so I subconsciously was searching for a way to show Casablanca’s humanity in my work there”. 

And it’s within that formula that the magic of Philip’s photography can be found. The unique and otherworldly quality doesn’t happen by accident; it’s a result of Philip’s resolute determination to find new perspectives. 

“I generally look to avoid taking pictures at head-height”, he says. “There’s a lot of reasons for that - for example, one is when you’re shooting wildlife. So much wildlife photography is from the perspective of looking down on animals, but that’s our worldview and not theirs. So I’ll often look for a lower vantage point when I’m looking to get an image featuring wildlife”. 

Above: This arresting image, shot in East Africa (one of Philip’s favourite places), is a testament to the virtues of exploring different perspectives in photography. 

The art of finding the right angle in photography is, as Philip explains, exactly that: An art. “There’s a great old analogy about an art director and a photographer”, he says, “which is that it’s like having a dog on a leash. A photographer should be able to sniff around basically everywhere, and the art director only pulls him back when he’s about to get run over”. 

That sense of experimentation is another reason why Philip’s pictures so often seem to capture brilliantly human qualities. “When I’m working with people, something that happens a lot is that the best pictures aren’t quite ‘the moment’ - they’re the microseconds before and after the moment where your subjects think you’re not shooting them”, he says. “It’s the split-second before they start worrying!”. 

Notably, this is an insight which has served Philip well in his commercial work. “There was one campaign I was working on for a travel brand where the concept was ‘reconnection’. I needed to get a shot which encapsulated that feeling of people reconnecting - with each other, with themselves, whatever it may be”, he says. “In the event, I was able to get the most natural-looking image using exactly that trick”. 

Above: This image, taken from a campaign for Sani Resort in Greece, communicates the concept of ‘reconnection’. 

Picking back through Philip’s body of work, it starts to come across as a kind of tonic for what have become the unfortunate byproducts of modern travel culture. That kind of Instagram-centric FOMO-baiting which envisions travel as a checklist or a ‘greatest hits’ tour of all the places we think we should go, juxtaposed with Philip’s ability to capture the spirit of places we want to see. 

That’s a theme that unites all of the images that Philip has touched on throughout our conversation. It’s been there since the beginning of it all - that undeniably human yearning for adventure, discovery, and to share it all with the world. 

It’s why there’s so much warmth and humanity in these pictures; something which ultimately speaks to the reason why travel occupies so many of our dreams in the first place.