“I’ve always been drawn to freckles,” says Brock Elbank. “My wife is quite freckly.” The London-based award-winning photographer is still riding high after the success of his beard portraiture series, which started out as a skin-cancer awareness campaign and grew into Beard, a three-week exhibition at Somerset House earlier this year.

Elbank first got into freckles in 2012, when he played football with his friend’s 10-year-old and found himself struck by the boy’s face. “There was something raw about him – his mum and dad are a very striking couple as well. So I shot him and got this freckles bug.”

Elbank came across my own freckled face on Instagram, where his “loyal following” will alert him to any freckles they come across.I sat for him and was excited to see my freckles given cult-like status, following years of feeling mainly indignation at them. Fifteen years ago, my mother meant well when she reassured me that my “angel kisses” were a gift – and not, as I’d believed, a defect. Her compliment simply washed over me. I hid my facial spots, but now I love every one of the buggers.

Elbank and his family spent two years in a Warwickshire village, following a decade in Sydney, before moving to London this summer. He is relishing the city’s ethnic diversity. “Whatever I do in the next five or 10 years, I want it to have diversity – Japanese, African, African-Caribbean or Peruvian. I’m looking for an Irish-Peruvian-Caribbean!”

Freckles, my unofficial name for his series, is nowhere near finished, though Elbank “wants to be done by this time next year”. By then, he’ll have hundreds of portraits to choose from. Recent subjects have included Kaine, who has different-coloured eyes, and Emily, whose blue hair is as bright as her piercing gaze.

“I feel like I’m just on the tip of the iceberg,” says Elbank, who next plans to photograph a freckled male model in New York, referred to him by past portrait-subject George Hard.

Brock is good fun. He’s also a perfectionist, editing each portrait for up to six hours. He says that his portraiture is not only about faces, but each person’s character – which is probably why he’s keen to shoot celebrities, too. Eddie Redmayne, perhaps, or Emma Stone.

After Freckles, Elbank wants to start a nude series, photographing adults “where I’m nude”, he says, joking. “No, I couldn’t think of anything worse.”

But for now he’s sticking to freckles. “After we finished Beard I had to detach myself from the whole thing because I’m not a beard photographer. I just shoot portraits – I’m just a photographer.”

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