The Daily Telegraph
7 November, 2003
By Jessica Berens

People used to come up to Mark Fiennes and ask him if he was related to “that explorer chappie”. He would endlessly explain that he and Sir Ranulph Fiennes were distant cousins. “I got very fed up with it,” he says. “In the end, I began to dislike Ranulph, until I met him much later. He was an absolutely charming man."

Nowadays, people come up to Mark Fiennes and tell him how much they adore his sons Ralph and Joseph and he thinks: “For Chrissake, I’ve got four other children. They are just as successful in their way, but their names don’t happen to be written in the bright lights.”

The light cast from the Hollywood firmament in which Ralph and Joseph move has, nevertheless, fallen on their siblings and the Fiennes family now has to navigate the challenges that arise from being related to two major luvvies.

Martha is a film director, Magnus is a composer, Sophie makes documentaries and Jake works as a gamekeeper in Norfolk. Each of them, while remaining loyal to their better-known brothers, has had to fight for recognition of their own work, which they take very seriously.

Their father, having observed all this, distrusts celebrity culture and, with one or two exceptions, the faces of his children will not feature in his forthcoming retrospective exhibition of photographs. “I cannot understand the mentality of people who stand around a stagedoor to ooh and aah at some actor or actress. These people are flesh and blood like you and me. I adore my children and I respect all six of them. They are all good friends to their old dad. What more could you want? I don’t want to capitalise on them.”

I observe that if he exhibited his photographs in America, he would be pressurised to blow Ralph’s face up to billboard size and sell it for $1,000.

“I know that in America they wouldn’t have any compunction about it,” he agrees, “and it would be quite acceptable in that idiom, but that does not reflect where either I or my children are coming from. The work stands and falls on whether it is good or not.”

The consequence is that Fiennes’s retrospective reflects on a profession spent taking photographs of architecture for Country Life magazine and for numerous photographic books, such as The Grand Irish Tour, published in 1982, and most recently, The Life and Works of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. There are also moments of reportage that reflect his eye, his humour and his political sensibility. The photographs of the 1979 Epsom Derby, for instance, show his interest in “counterpoint” – on the one hand, there are peope tricked out in hats and tails; on the other, the drunk on the bench. “It was my way of getting back at the pomposity of hierarchy,” he says.

Fiennes has hated hierarchy since his boyhood at Sandroyd prep school and at Eton, both of which filled him with deep misery and the memory of which still makes him shudder.

“I couldn’t understand why my parents conformed to the social idea of the time, which was to pack your eight-year-old boy off. I didn’t know why I had been kicked out of the house. And I found it a struggle to live and work in a pack where, if you were an academic you were a swot and if you were good at art you were a pansy.”

Fiennes left Eton early and found himself with no job and no qualifications. “I was rudderless,” he says. “I had no professon and no training. And the idea of being employed by somebody just didn’t appeal.”

He met his first wife, Jini, in 1961 when he was working as a tenant farmer in Suffolk. “The first time I clapped eyes on her, I knew”, he says. They were married in 1962.

Fiennes had an ambition to be a film cameraman but, when the children started to arrive, he knew that “it was far too risky”. Jini suggested he try still photography. The guitarist Julian Bream, a friend, lent him two cameras; commissions began to arrive but there were not enough of them to allay financial worries.

“Everyone is worried about money,” he points out. “If you’ve got children, you’ve always got the anxiety of not only their happiness, but have they got enough to put in their tum-tums. So, yes. Money always was and always is a worry.”

At 23, Jini had published a novel, The Burial. She believed in the importances of the arts, and never nagged her husband to take up a more remunerative career. “Jini used to say that as long as you are committed to an idea, you can do it if you’ve got faith in yourself. It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it with the fullest of your intention, with your heart and your guts.”

Fiennes supplemented his income by moving into houses, restoring them and selling them for a profit, so the family, for some years, moved as a gipsy troupe, from Suffolk to Ireland, from Ireland to Wiltshire. Ralph Fiennes has recalled life then as a kind of moving commune and attended, variously, a Quaker school, a Catholic school and a grammar school in Salisbury. His sister Martha has claimed that she attended 14 schools, though her father dismisses this as a “grotesque exaggeration”.

Jini died of breast cancer in 1993, at the age of 55. Mark married his second wife, Caroline, a professional flower arranger, in 1995, having met her when they worked with Norma Major on a book about Chequers.

He has been happy to allow Jini the credit for developing the attitudes of their children, though he cannot help but be proud of his part in their upbringing. This is reflected in the number of film posters that line his office and in the story he tells about the press party that followed the launch of Onegin, a film that was directed by Martha, starred Ralph and for which Magnus wrote the music.

“This woman comes simpering up and says: “Oh, Mark, you must be so proud, what a pround moment!” And I said, looking them up and down: “Not one of you would be here tonight if it wasn’t for me.” Biologically, I am 50 per cent of the equation.”

Mark Fiennes Photographs (1970 – 2003) is at the Menier Gallery, 51 Southwark Street, London SE1 from November 11 to 22.
www.markfiennes.com