John Hedgecoe close-up macro (All Rounder)

John Hedgecoe was a talented photographer and inspiring teacher who produced many elegant books of landscapes and portraits and was a prolific writer of manuals on how to take pictures. One of his images is probably the most widely reproduced of all time — that of the Queen in profile on British postage stamps. It was in 1966 that that he was recommended by the Postmaster General to photograph the Queen. 

The shoot took place in the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace and within 20 minutes or so he had shot dozens of rolls of film at which point he said he thought he was done. “So soon, Mr Hedgecoe?” asked the Queen. Realising that he was being granted more time, the anxious Hedgecoe leapt at the chance to try a different light and they moved to the Music Room, where he took yet more pictures of his royal subject against the window. She chose 14 of his images, eventually whittled to just one which was then rendered in plaster relief by the artist and sculptor Arnold Machin. The image became immortal, appearing on British and Commonwealth stamps to this day.

 John Hedgecoe was born in 1932 — although he maintained the fiction that his birthday was in 1937 — in Brentford, West London, the son of William Hedgecoe, who worked for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in the Far East and who was a fireman during the Blitz, and Kathleen Don. During the war he was evacuated to Cornwall to stay with an aunt, Dolly, and was educated Gulval Village School near Penzance. Later he wrote a novel, Breakfast with Dolly, a thinly disguised memoir, about an evacuee growing up in the West Country.

 He began taking pictures as a teenager and studied photography at Guildford Scool of Art under Ifor and Joy Thomas. During his National Service with the RAF he contributed to an aerial photographic survey of wartime bomb damage. After the RAF in 1957 he became a staff photographer for Queen magazine where his reputation as an exceptional portrait photographer grew throughout the 1960s and where he remained until 1972.

 His unconventional but elegant approach to portraiture led to freelance commissions for The Observer, The Sunday Times andThe Sunday Telegraph, shooting people such as Francis Bacon, Agatha Christie, Vita Sackville-West, John Betjeman, Ted Hughes, Stephen Hawking, David Hockney and Mary Quant. His pictures also illustrated features on fashion and architecture.

In the mid-1960s Hedgecoe persuaded the Royal College of Art (RCA) to let him create a department of photography and in 1975 he became the first professor of photography in Britain. He was an unstoppable, creative force at the RCA, a dynamic personality, determined to place the study of photography on an equal footing with the rest of the arts and to make the college one of the most important artistic institutions in the world. He had a profound effect on the teaching of photography and wrote a bestselling book on how to take pictures, The Photographer’s Handbook. First published in 1977 and with more than 1,250 illustrations, it has been frequently reprinted and remains the bible for photography enthusiasts.

Hedgecoe produced a broad array of books on architecture, landscapes and portraits, including The Spirit of the Garden, for which he travelled throughout Europe and the US; England’s World Heritage, in which he photographed sites for English Heritage;Shakespeare’s Land, with the historian A. L. Rowse; riding schools of the world; a book of photographs of the works of Picasso; photographs to decorate anthologies of poems by Thomas Hardy and Robert Burns; Zillij, his pictures of Moroccan ceramics; and three volumes on the sculptor Henry Moore.

 The two became friends in the 1950s when Hedgecoe was a student and they collaborated on two books, Henry Spencer Moore and Henry Moore, My Ideas, Inspiration and Life as an Artist. Moore died in 1986 and a third book, A Monumental Vision: The Sculpture of Henry Moore was published in 1998. Richard Calvocoressi, director of the Henry Moore Foundation, described the three books as “an exceptional range of incisive and insightful photographs. These are among the most important visual records we have of Moore’s life and work.”

Among Hedgecoe’s manuals on how to take photographs are The Book of Photography (1976), a volume on photographing babies and toddlers, another on photographing young children, and The Art of Digital Photography (2006).

Hedgecoe was a man of enormous personality, self-belief and physical energy. He could be outspoken but always demonstrated great warmth, kindness and generosity of spirit. Away from photography he devoted much energy to restoring Oxnead Hall, his originally 16th-century house and garden in Norfolk, celebrated as the repository of the Paston Letters written during the Wars of the Roses.

He was twice married, first to Julia Mardon, and then in 2001 to Jenny Hogg, who survives him, with two sons and a daughter from his first marriage.

John Hedgecoe, photographer, teacher and author, was born on March 24, 1932. He died of cancer on June 3, 2010, aged 78.