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MARK FIENNES, the distinguished photographer, was best known for his work in the field of architecture and interiors. Fiennes was, however, a photographer of extraordinary versatility, whose work - featured in 2003 in a major retrospective at the Menier Gallery in London - reflected his sensitivity to places and people, his perennial sense of humour and, not least, an ingrained dislike of pomposity and hierarchy that gave many of his pictures a cutting edge of social comment.
Having taken up professional photography when he was nearly 40, Mark Fiennes achieved success as the illustrator of innumerable articles in Country Life magazine and of no fewer than 25 books, including a collaboration with Norma Major on a history of Chequers (Chequers: the Prime Minister's country house and its history, 1996). He craved new challenges and was working on several projects at the time of his death, including an exhibition of the work of the architect Norman Foster to be shown at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston later this year.
Mark Fiennes was born at Dalton, Northumberland in 1933, the eldest of five children of the industrialist Maurice Fiennes, who was later knighted by Harold Wilson for his services to the export of British heavy engineering products, and of his wife Sylvia. Fiennes's mother was a strong influence, a keen horsewoman with a sense of style in dress and decor that her son inherited.
At the age of eight, Fiennes was sent away to preparatory school and then to Eton, an experience he recalled with distaste many decades later. Excelling neither academically nor as a sportsman, he found Eton abhorrent, a place memorable largely for sheer discomfort.
He became seriously ill with glomerulonephritis (a disease of the kidneys) towards the end of...