Official Game of Thrones photographer Helen Sloan details her favorite images
If you’re like me and you’ve loved those gorgeous Game of Thrones still photographs HBO has been putting out for the last eight seasons, then you owe a debt of gratitude to the show’s principle stills photographer, Helen Sloan. She’s been on the Thrones set since day one, and has snapped innumerable beautiful images. Speaking to Buzzfeednews, she names some of her favorites.
Sloan is a Belfast, Northern Ireland native who was always a photography nut. At the age of 11, she tool a job with a traveling circus to immortalize “melancholic portraits of clowns and acrobats.” She later worked in the low-budget Irish horror film industry, was eventually hired to cover the original Thrones pilot, and the rest is history. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy a photogenic trip down memory lane.
A movie producer encouraged Sloan to apply for the HBO set photographer gig, telling her “[L]ook, there’s this job coming into Belfast, and it’s got all kinds of wizards and a lot of the nerdy stuff that you’re into.” Though skeptical, she mailed her work portfolio to HBO in “a big solid leather-bound book. And, of course, that was a decade ago, and I managed to make it the whole way through without perishing.”
One of Sloan’s favorite Thrones photographs is a first season snap of Michelle Fairley in “Cripples, Bastards and Broken Things” (above). “She just was Catelyn Stark,” Sloan said. “Everybody felt it, everybody felt that motherly love, just kind of emanating from her. She’s just so ethereal and amazing. And I love — maybe a bit selfishly — but I love that Michelle is a Northern Irish actress.”
Sloan also loves this still from “The Rains of Castamere” of Catelyn fighting in the midst of her family’s slaughter at the hands of Walder Frey. Sloan was blown away by Fairley’s acting ability:
"One of my most moving moments of the whole experience of Game of Thrones was her scream during the Red Wedding. I think there wasn’t a person in the room that day that didn’t get chills. And she did it again and again. And every time it was harrowing, and heartbreaking. And you know — and she was gone."
“I think if you transported me from those days of the pilot to a day in the middle of Season 8 — I mean, they’re just two completely different jobs,” Sloan explained. Over the years, the growing popularity of the show fueled “a hype and an excitement and a pressure to succeed.” But that came with a price. “[T]he scale and the pressure and everything just kept multiplying. It was a tiny little pup, and then it became a giant direwolf.”
In a show packed with darkness and misery, Sloan is fond of this image from “Valar Morghulis,” where Daenerys and Khal Drogo share a sweet family moment with their son that never was, Rhaego. Of course, this is no more than a vision Daenerys experiences while being held captive in the House of Undying in Qarth.
It’s cool to find out that Sloan’s daughter was cast as baby Rhaego. The episode director, Alan Taylor, used the girl because she had “tons of hair” and “didn’t look like a baby.” Sloan’s daughter is 8 years old now, and familiar with the scene: “She knows who Jason and Emilia are,” Sloan said. “And she’s like, ‘Yeah, they’re my TV mommy and daddy.'”
Another Sloan favorite is this shot of Podrick Payne (Daniel Portman) cradling Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) after he is assaulted by the nefarious Ser Mandon Moore during the Battle of the Blackwater. “Dan and Peter — I love their kind of strange relationship,” Sloan said. “I’m drawn to those moments of quiet, because I feel like that’s where the power is. If there aren’t any moments of quiet emotion, you know, and moments that are real character moments, then it’s pointless. I just think that moment of Pod and Tyrion was just beautiful. It was almost like a religious painting, that moment — you know, the beautiful light.”
Next on Sloan’s list is this image of Beric Dondarrion facing the Hound in trial by combat in “Kissed by Fire.” In the early episodes, the prop department simply coated Beric’s sword with flammable liquid. Later, they designed a blade made of material that burned by itself.
Either way, it made the set very warm. “It was so hot!” Sloan says. “Everyone was sweating buckets. I mean, there was fire everywhere. The actors were pouring ice water down inside their costumes because they were so warm. And I think that battle inside the cave was such a trial for everyone that any shot that I got that was good, and that I liked, I just felt like it was such an enormous victory.”
Sloan is also a huge fan of actor Richard Dormer: “His voice just creates a vacuum in the room,” she says. “When he speaks as Beric, you just get sucked, and everything disappears.”
It’s not hard to see why Sloan loves this haunting, gritty picture of Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) incarcerated in the Great Sept of Baelor by the High Sparrow in “Hardhome.”
“Because there’s so many parts of her (Cersei) that are broken, and you almost feel sorry for her,” Sloan explained. “And then you’re like, ‘No, actually. I hate her.’ And that’s why I put her in here in a moment of weakness — because she’s so powerful a lot of the time.”
We all know this awesome shot of Jon and Sansa hugging at their reunion in “Book of the Stranger.” “Well, everybody wants the Starks to be OK, don’t they?” Sloan said.
"I’ve yet to meet anyone who wasn’t rooting for all those kids to get back together. That moment of Sansa in the courtyard, when the camera’s on her and she’s breathing. And she’s like, Is it him? Is it him? And then it’s him. You feel it as a viewer. I’m part of the company, I know the story — but I still felt that tension. It’s like there’s live theater happening right in front of the crew."
Along the way, Sloan realized that she was creating an amazing archive of images, a continuing chronicle of the phenomenon that was Game of Thrones. She’s collected a visual history of the entire show from its very first day with shooting behind-the-scenes photographs taken on every single day of production.
You can take a close look at Sloan’s work in a gorgeous hardcover book titled The Photography of Game of Thrones, to be published in September of this year. “In one season of Game of Thrones, I got to inhabit so many worlds,” Sloan said. “Going through a million photos from a decade, it was only when I started to do that process that I really realized: God, this is something that I will be talking about for the rest of my life.”
And like all Thrones cast and crew members. Sloan is melancholy about everything coming to an end. “For the crew, we have built a family on the ground,” she said. “And all of a sudden, the last day of Season 8, that family just evaporated. One day there was 700 people there, and then the next day, they’d all gone home.”
“It really is something that we will carry with us for the rest of our lives.”
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You can check out more of Sloan’s interview and additional pictures here.
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