British Airways High Life

  • Matt Richardson

With a circulation of 3.9 million readers each month, High Life is BA’s flagship print title available on all flights worldwide produced by Cedar Communications. Since January 2019 I have been Picture Editor on the title and am responsible for all imagery – photographic commissioning, shoot production and picture research. My main objective when coming onto the title was to showcase the very best that travel has to offer. BA’s customers are considered as ‘travellers, not tourists’, and this content filter is applied throughout the title. The magazine blends beautiful travel features with celebrity interviews and shoots as well as fashion editorials, still life shoots and general pop culture round-ups. Since joining the title, cover features have included shoots with Phoebe Waller-Bridge (shot by David Titlow), Sophie Turner (shot by Eric Ryan Anderson), Louis Theroux (shot by Matt Holyoak) and Gugu Mbatha-Raw (shot by Austin Hargrave).

In 2019 British Airways celebrated its 100th birthday, and to support this we produced a special edition of High Life available on board all flights in August 2019. The issue had a split-run of 12 covers (all pulled by myself from British Airways’ Heritage Centre to highlight 12 key moments from BA’s history), and included a definitive list of 100 Wonderfully British Things (according to High Life), along with pieces looking both back on a century of travel and forward to the next century.