Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4.
Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury,
that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast,
but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds.
Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else.
I hope you enjoy listening.
My cast away this week is the photographer Richard Young.
Once known as the King of the Paparazzi,
over the last 50 years he's gone from sneaking into one of Elizabeth Taylor's parties,
snapping away until she kicked him out, to becoming a bit of a VIP himself.
Invited behind the velvet rope by the likes of Vanity Fair, the Golden Globes and Sir Elton John.
He has his own gallery in Kensington full of photos from his archive,
a treasure trove featuring millions of images that chart the evolution of contemporary pop culture.
His work has been honoured by the University of the Arts,
the UK Picture Editors Guild and acquired by the National Portrait Gallery.
Not bad for a working class Londoner who left school at 14 wanting to prove his market trader father wrong about his prospects.
He started out with a borrowed camera before getting a break from his friend David Bailey,
who commissioned his celebrity photographs.
He befriended many of his subjects, including Freddie Mercury and, eventually, Elizabeth Taylor.