Photographing Jeremy Grantham for Barron’s
On December 18th, 2025, I photographed Jeremy Grantham at GMO’s offices on 53 State Street in Boston for Barron’s. The assignment accompanied a substantial feature that included an interview and an excerpt from Grantham’s new book, The Making of a Permabear: The Perils of Long-term Investing in a Short-term World, co-written with financial historian Edward Chancellor and published by Grove Atlantic. Grantham — co-founder of GMO, legendary bubble-spotter, and one of the most consequential investment minds of the past half century — is not a figure one photographs casually.
The brief called for a strong Boston portrait befitting a man widely regarded as the investment world’s preeminent contrarian. Barron’s wanted tight compositions against neutral backgrounds and an environmental portrait using the office itself. Having arrived an hour early to scout and set up lighting, I identified two primary settings: a wood-paneled conference room wall whose warmth and gravity suited the subject, and the Boston skyline from the 33rd floor — an expansive backdrop that placed Grantham, quite literally, above the financial district where he has spent decades challenging market orthodoxy.
The shoot was a focused thirty-minute window before a holiday party claimed the space. Constraints like these sharpen the work considerably.
With lighting pre-set and compositions planned during the scout, we moved efficiently between setups, producing both the tight portraits and environmental frames Barron’s needed in horizontal and vertical orientations.
The resulting feature appeared in early January 2026 as “How Jeremy Grantham Nearly Lost It All and Became a Value Investor,” alongside a companion interview on his current market outlook. The book excerpt recounts a formative early-career encounter with speculative small-cap stocks — the kind of painful lesson that cemented Grantham’s lifelong commitment to value investing and his deep suspicion of market euphoria. The Making of a Permabear traces that philosophy from its roots in a Yorkshire coal-mining town through six decades of booms, busts, and pioneering quantitative work at GMO, culminating in his massive philanthropic commitment to environmental protection.
There is a particular challenge in portraiture when the subject carries that weight of reputation and intellect. The goal is not merely documentation but something closer to interpretation — finding, in the geometry of light and expression, some visible trace of the conviction and independence that define a life’s work. Thirty minutes is not long. But when the preparation is thorough and the subject is Jeremy Grantham, it is enough.
