Palaces made of butter, natural disasters, cultures from East to West and, above all, people. Laurie Lewis has photographed them all. Needless to say, I had a rich picking of subjects to talk about, but I wanted to focus on his photographs of the ballet, opera and theatre which form the staple of the Independent culture section and the Royal Opera House’s advertisements. With an impeccable sense of form, human interaction and theatrical character, newspapers, posters and magazines such as Time and Life have all vied to have his pictures. "But," he says, "I don’t want to talk about that. That type of photography is just my bread and butter. I want to talk about my portraits." Considering that his portrait of the ballet dancer Rudolf Nuryev is one of my favourite works, the change of plan presents no problem.

Expressive and voluble as Lewis is, he begins with a simple assertion on the matter of taking portraits: "Most people don’t like having their photo taken." This agrees with the general consensus, and few photographers can establish a relationship between the sitter and photographer so that the former has no insecure compulsion to affect a studied expression or hide their personality behind a defensively stony countenance. When asked how he deals with this problem, Lewis remarks, "my technique is to confront their insecurities; I act like a doctor."

In the stories of the various famous people he has photographed, insecurities about being captured on film become a dominant theme. Lewis spoke of the various ways in which, under very tight time constraints, he had to calm, take control of and then photograph the sitter at the very moment when their insecurities abated and their real personality flickered through. "Anyone who is powerful," he sagely notes, "and is used to taking control, feels usurped [when photographed], and they bully you. You have to be confident." Later he adds, "you must find a point of contact". It is this second assertion which is the crux of portrait-making and has been crucial in his work from Bob Marley, to Status Quo, to Diana Ross. The last, who was "hostile" to Lewis, immediately assumed that he wanted something racy, which she conveyed to him by hoisting up her breasts and saying, "I suppose you want this?" The point of contact was not, however, at that moment but when he suggested that she wear her overcoat – "it was $10,000 and beautiful"– and when he applied a dab of makeup, though she did not need it: "the point was to communicate that I was on her side, that I cared about how she looked."

It is vanity and perhaps an atavistic fear of the photo taking away our soul that makes people so inimical to being photographed. "People", Lewis says, "have ideas about what they think they look like and how they want to look. Then there is how they actually look." This complex triad contained within the real and the imagined self is a psychological nuance that has to be carefully managed by the portrait photographer and is something Lewis understands well. He recognises that it is his job "to concentrate on making [the sitter] look good". He certainly does. But their beauty is not derived from obliterating any epidermal accidents or physical oddities by the airbrush or re-shaping tool, but by composing a portrait in which the formal elements of the photograph itself are so tightly composed and sensitively arranged, that on the basic level of form, ‘ugliness’ has no place. The famous set designer Maria Björnson’s large nose is not an unfortunate inheritance. It is strong and powerful, which Lewis celebrates by using other elements in the picture - a bust of a head - to tie all the shapes (including the nose) into a comprehensive whole.

It is this powerfully formal aspect, so perfectly poised with an illuminating look at the character of the sitter, that makes his portraits so powerful. The influence in this respect comes from the fact that not only is he a brilliant technician in the other arts – he insists that "photographers should learn the art of drawing, printmaking, painting, sculpture and so on" – but also that he has a visual sensitivity to them. Thus the old masters and his ‘hero’ Vermeer are vital in his composing and lighting of his pictures. When taking Harold Pinter’s portrait, he saw that the room he stood in had a light which "suggested Vermeer – the Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window". Lewis had Pinter hold a letter that the writer had drafted opposing the Iraq War, and changing the Dutch master’s tradition of never revealing the content of the letter, he proudly remarks, "I angled the photograph in such a way that you could actually just read the letter".

If Vermeer was the inspiration in that portrait, then surely the careful articulation of hands in his portrait of Rudolf Nuryev suggests a Leonardo da Vinci sketch. "I try to make up in my mind an idea of a shape – like a triangle", he says. In the case of Nuryev, he noticed that a triangle could be formed by the dancer’s hands and the ghostly glow of a hand in a painting behind. "He’s a performer, and when I asked him to raise his hands he naturally did that pose." It is in this portrait that the consummation of Lewis’s own creative understanding of composition and the sitter’s natural character perfectly coincide at the click of a button. What masterpiece could ever have been so quickly and yet so perfectly created?