Michael G Wilson has been the man behind every James Bond movie since Moonraker in 1979. But the 74-year-old hasn’t limited his role to being producer or executive producer. Wilson has also notched up no fewer than 18 cameos in 007’s various adventures, as pall-bearer, doctor, man in a corridor, police chief, army general, casino gambler, Nasa technician, Greek priest and Soviet security council member.



Wilson cuts a similar figure in the world of photography: hugely influential, yet content to remain an eminence grise. Since the 80s, his enthusiasm for collecting photographs has grown enormously, in tandem with the prices such works can now fetch at auction. This once underpriced commodity has now spawned a legion of speculators, dealers and collectors. These days, it’s not uncommon for a print to go under the hammer for more than a Turner watercolour.

11,000 images … Michael G Wilson. Photograph: Vera Anderson/WireImage

Some collectors have singular obsessions, hunting down photographs of hands, merry-go-rounds, trees, people with their eyes shut, birds or eggs or both. Among their burgeoning ranks are a few who have become patrons in their own right, keen to enlarge the history of photography and the photography of history. Simon Baker, in post since 2009 as the Tate’s first curator of photography, would certainly put Wilson in this category, saying he has “been transformative for the Tate’s photography”. In fact, Wilson’s collection now numbers 11,000 images, making it three times bigger than the Tate’s. It is constantly on loan in Britain and overseas: the recent, hugely praised exhibition of William Eggleston portraits at the National Portrait Gallery was largely sourced from his collection.

Lately, Wilson has been acting as patron, helping to promote photographers, in particular by funding prizes. One protege is Chino Otsuka, who got in touch in 2008 after being awarded a National Media Museum bursary (which Wilson sponsored). Otsuka, a Tokyo-born, London-based photographer, takes visual storytelling into another dimension, all of which fascinates Wilson. “If you look at traditional art,” he says, “the problem is how to tell a story in one image – all at once.” He contrasts this with Bond movies: “We tell a narrative through a narrow timeline with no deviation, just the story from beginning to end. Bang. There it is.”

That’s me with myself … 1982 and 2006, Paris, France, from Imagine Finding Me by Chino Otsuka.

Otsuka caught Wilson’s eye by inserting pictures of herself today into her own childhood photographs, resulting in a beguiling series of double self-portraits: grown woman and young girl, side by side on the beach, flitting past each other in the street, or leaning against the windows of a deli tucking into a snack. The collector helped the 44-year-old turn the series, Imagine Finding Me, into a book published in 2012. Her collaboration with this one revered collector is now drawing the attention of others, particularly in Los Angeles.

It was in the 70s that Wilson first got the idea of collecting. A college friend, Weston Naef, was working as a curator and, in his New York apartment one day, Wilson bought five prints – pictures of American cinemas – from a then unknown Japanese photographer called Hiroshi Sugimoto, who has since exhibited everywhere from London to Texas. When Naef was hired by the Getty Museum in 1984 to build its photography collection, Wilson followed him west to Los Angeles, where he now keeps the Sugimoto prints.



Past lives … Newhaven fisher-folk by Hill & Adamson, c1844. Photograph: Wilson Centre for Photography

At the time, Wilson was preoccupied with 19th-century works. Later, in the 90s, his attention turned to the 20th, though after seeing the Elton John collection currently at Tate Modern, he only had one thought: “I missed the boat – certainly on the modernists. I could have done better with André Kertész. But a lot of it has to do with what’s available, what’s accessible, and money being a scarce resource.”

But then every collector yearns for what they don’t own. Newell Harbin, who sources photographs for Elton John, fantasises about getting a print of that famous Man Ray shot of a woman’s back bearing violin f-holes. “Unfortunately,” she says, “we do not have Violon d’Ingres. The Pompidou has the most amazing example of that print.”

‘Probably a masterpiece’ … Cooking House of the 8th Hussars, 1855, by Roger Fenton. Photograph: Alamy

I join Polly Fleury, one of Wilson’s four curators, to look over some prints in one of his London archives, situated next door to his home in Hampstead. There’s a shot of some Newhaven fisher-folk by Hill & Adamson, dating from the mid-1800s: clad in multiple layers, wearing Flemish-style bonnets, the women huddle beside large creel baskets. There’s a Roger Fenton (“probably a masterpiece”) from the same era. It’s called Cooking House of the 8th Hussars, and you can see Fenton’s portable darkroom – a converted Canterbury wine merchant’s cart – just visible to left of the picture.

“You have to take care of the work,” says Fleury, telling me the photographs are kept away from bright daylight, at a temperature of 17C with 50% relative humidity. But even excessive care can’t stop some colour prints from discolouring over time, or various mounted work from deteriorating. The smaller prints and daguerreotypes are kept in Wilson’s home. At a walnut dining table set for 12, we discuss his collecting addiction; a Camille Corot landscape of sinuous trees hangs on a nearby wall, a bequest from his mother Dana.

He says he keeps the large and difficult to store prints at another nearby property, in a climate-controlled white cube, along with some James Bond bric-a-brac (I imagine Jaws’s teeth, maybe a Moonraker space suit). These prints include Luc Delahaye’s Les Pillards, taken in Haiti during the 2010 elections. “It’s probably the most amazing moment he ever captured,” says Wilson. “People stealing hair nets and being shot at.”

All for a hair net … Luc Delahaye’s Les Pillards, taken in Haiti during the 2010 elections.

Wilson helped Taryn Simon, a 42-year-old New Yorker, create an entire project from early research to completion. Called A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII, it was produced over a four-year period and presented as a gift to the Tate where it was shown in 2011. Among a wide range of subjects, Simon photographed test rabbits infected with a lethal disease in Australia and the first woman ever to hijack an aircraft.

Both Simon and Delahaye have become friends and were invited to take shots on the set of Skyfall. Not all photographers, of course, enjoy the same cosy relationship with the collector. Some key figures in European photography – Henri Cartier-Bresson and Don McCullin for example – he doesn’t collect at all. So I went to find a place more welcoming of their work.

But why would you want to live with war pictures?

Somewhere south of Steeple Bumpstead, in the wilds of Essex, our taxi negotiates an electric gate and a half-mile driveway. Passing through landscaped meadows dotted with artificial ponds, we pull up at the door of a spacious 1920s country house and enter a hall full of muddy riding boots and kids’ shoes. Harriet Logan, 49, greets me with an Irish coffee. She’s been out riding Tiger, her thoroughbred ex-racehorse.

Andy Simpkin, chair of the Victoria & Albert museum’s photographs acquisitions group, has called what Logan has amassed “a world-class collection of photojournalism”, praising that core ingredient for all the best collections: “an individual passion”. And that’s despite the fact that Logan and her curator Tristan Lund have only been collecting since 2012, when they were invoiced for their first print, by legendary Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt.

Medivac, a 2010 picture by Damon Winter of soldiers in Afghanistan shielding a wounded comrade from a helicopter’s downdraft, takes centre stage in the living room. Out in the hall, there’s Woman of Sarajevo, a giant photograph by Tom Stoddart taken in 1993, showing a woman walking past sandbags and an armed soldier in Sarajevo. “It’s kind of humanising conflict,” says Logan. “She’s put on her makeup and high heels and is walking down Sniper’s Alley.”

Down Sniper’s Alley … Tom Stoddart’s Woman of Sarajevo. Photograph: Tom Stoddart/Getty

But why would you live with war pictures? “I feel very strongly that these images shouldn’t just be folded up inside magazines and left to die there. History is so easily forgotten, but photography marks it, makes it real, puts it in our face.” Lund adds: “You make the viewer slow down. By putting images behind glass and freeing them from text, you are raising their status. They’re no longer purely illustration.”

Up the stairs, there’s The Falling Man, Richard Drew’s 9/11 shot of a man plummeting, upside down, from the World Trade Center. “Can you imagine? Having no choice. I’m going to die – because I’m going to get burnt, or because I’m going to jump.” Logan shudders, recalling an article about the jumpers that mentioned “the way they could hear them hitting the ground”.

Along the hall is the official “Don Corridor”, boasting some of McCullin’s finest war images. Hanging against hand-painted floral wallpaper, the prints are of a quality I’ve never seen before. “I have so much love for that man,” says Logan. “He’s one of the greatest artists this country has ever produced.”

‘Photography makes history real, puts it in our face’ … Harriet Logan in front of Medivac. Photograph: Stuart Franklin

Not all Logan’s collection is hard-hitting photojournalism. She also collects Saul Leiter and Cartier-Bresson, along with landscapes by Bradford Washburn and Ed Burtynsky. If her house caught fire, she says, there is one picture she would not leave without: a shot from Josef Koudelka’s acclaimed 1967 series Gypsies, of a man with a horse.

Logan – who would “find it hard to live with passive pictures of flowers” – is an impulse buyer. One large Bruce Davidson print, of a white horse lying on a muddy slope in Wales, I remembered seeing in the hallway of Davidson’s New York apartment. Logan came across it there, too, and ordered a print on the spot. Lund’s more circumspect and has also tried to broaden the collection to include conceptual work by Trevor Paglen and Richard Mosse.

I pass a photograph taken by Logan herself of a chador-wearing woman in Afghanistan. “It was one of the times when I really felt what it was like being a female photographer,” she says of the trip, “because there is no way a male photographer would have got in the room with them at all.” Logan found that under the veil, “these Afghan women were covered in makeup, plastered with it, which was illegal under the Taliban”.

‘One of the greatest’ … Don McCullin’s The Bogside, Derry, 1971. Photograph: Don McCullin

In 1992, at the age of 24, Logan won the Ian Parry photojournalism award. “It changed my life,” she says. Twenty years later, she would start her own campaign to prop up the ailing world of photojournalism, attempting to fulfil the role that colour supplements once regularly undertook, publishing in-depth photojournalism. Her own collection of photojournalism will this month leave her home for the first time ever for History Through a Lens, a show at the Victoria Art Gallery, Bath.

With help from her husband Mark, Logan now funds the very award she won, together with the W Eugene Smith grant in humanistic photography. In the past two years, she has funded Ed Burtynsky’s Anthropocene project exploring man’s environmental impact; Moises Saman’s Discordia, an account of the Arab spring; and Matt Black’s The Geography of Poverty, a portrait of US communities where 20% of people live below the poverty line.

“Collectors like me,” she says, “can influence the way our history is defined.”