Valerie Phillips “I feel like with PJ Harvey I won the lottery, because she’s my favorite all-time artist, singer, writer, and musician. I worked with her a bunch of times and this shoot was in L.A. She actually taught me a really good life lesson. I had two ideas for a shoot — one set in the desert, and the other in a downtown motel. She picked the desert and when I told her we had to pick her up at 5 a.m. she said, ‘But my work hours are nine to six.’ I thought she was joking. I’d shot her so many times and was like, ‘Polly, it’s me! What are you talking about?’

“I realized that she’s taken a huge amount of control over the way she works so that when she’s there and you’re doing a shoot with her she’s on fire and she’s 100 f–king percent, but she’s doing it within her boundaries. At the time, I didn’t have any boundaries. I was working 24/7 and saying yes to everything but when I realized she was serious about not getting up early to drive into the desert I thought, ‘You know what? I really think about my life differently.’ Not long after that I stopped working on the weekends. I didn’t travel for a year. I not only took a leaf out of her book, I went really far with it. And by the way, we ended up staying in L.A. and they’re my favorite pictures of her that we ever made.”