Members Stories: Boris goes for a run…

In the first post of what will be a regular feature of BPPA Members telling the story behind a photo, BPPA Member Peter Macdiarmid, photographer London News Pictures, talks about …. Boris goes for a run ….
It’s not often that a press photograph leads the news agenda, but it does happen now and again.
I have been working as a press photographer for 31 years starting out on local newspapers in south London then progressing to The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, Reuters and 10 years as senior news photographer at Getty Images. Currently I work at London News Pictures, covering news and politics.
For me news photography is a passion and I put a lot of time and effort into looking for different images that catch the reader’s attention and illustrate a story in a unique, and hopefully original way. Sometimes this approach can make an ordinary image really stand out.
With this in mind I went looking for former foreign secretary Boris Johnson at his Oxfordshire home during last week’s Conservative Party Conference. Thinking that Boris would leave his house and head up the M40 to Birmingham for the second day of conference I positioned myself in the road outside by his driveway. Usually Boris will give a happy wave to any reporters and photographers as he gets into his car, but today I was on my own.
A short while after the sunrise began to cut through the October chill I spotted Boris leaving for an early morning run wearing his usual flowery shorts. I managed to capture a cheery wave before he disappeared down the lane that leads to the farmland surrounding his house. Normal practice, when there is a group of press doorstepping Boris, is to wait for his return and photograph him running up the lane back home, but today I decided to make use of the golden hour sunrise.
Having not ventured out into the nearby fields previously, I had to make an educated guess as to his return route. I located a spot that would enable me to photograph him crossing a path edged with long grass between two ploughed fields before turning left towards me.
I had guessed correctly and a few minutes later Boris emerged from the woodland leading to the path. He spotted me and waved. Sometimes he waves without looking up, and on this occasion he was also half raising his other arm for balance, all of which made a rather unusual image. He then jogged past me on his way home.

Peter Macdiarmid, photographer London News Pictures
© Licensed to London News Pictures. 01/10/2018. Thame, UK. Boris Johnson waves at photographers as he runs near his Oxfordshire home. The former foreign secretary is due to attend Conservative Party Conference this week. Photo credit: Peter Macdiarmid/LNP

Rather pleased that I had found a different way of photographing the MP that was the talking point of the Conservative Party Conference, I set off back to the car to edit and transmit my images.
Within a couple of hours the images started to appear online, but with a headline that was markedly different to my caption ‘Boris Johnson waves as he runs through fields near his Oxfordshire home’. The Mirror online headline was ‘Boris Johnson commits greatest trolling in world history by running through a FIELD OF WHEAT’…. referring to the Prime Minister’s confession that the ‘naughtiest thing she has ever done’ was to ‘run through a field of wheat as a child’
My images of a man out jogging in the morning sunshine began to take on a life of their own. I spent the rest of the day fielding calls from ITV, Channel 5, BBC TV, CNN International and German TV asking for the picture for news bulletins. Multiple newspaper online websites were publishing my pictures and it was being talked about on radio bulletins by lunchtime. That day’s Evening Standard ran it on page one and another inside.
Tuesday’s papers ran the image across four front pages and on inside pages too.

I have received a few phone calls asking me if it was a stunt – as you can see – it wasn’t.
Peter Macdiarmid
London News Pictures

Photography is not harassment

 
This is an open letter to the ITV management who have promoted their programme “Tonight: Harassment Uncovered” which, in places, confuses photography with sexual harassment. The programme aired at 7.30pm on the 23rd of February 2017
Dear ITV
Professional photographers are against any and all harassment of people going about their private and lawful business. To suggest or imply anything else would be disingenuous at best and libellous at worst. Street photography is a legitimate and entirely honourable form of documentary photography practised the world over.
Should any individual use this or any other art form as a cloak to hide their illegal activities then that is an issue that should be part of a Police investigation and not an excuse to demonise an entire genre of documentary photography and film-making.
The laws already exist to stop harassment and stalking and a blanket ban on any and all photography or filming without permission (amateur or professional, it matters not) would be to the detriment of society as a whole.
The BPPA

And Then The Prime Minister Hit Me – the new book from Brian Harris.

Brian Harris

 
Veteran Fleet Street photographer and founder member of The BPPA Brian Harris has just published his long-awaited book “…and then the Prime Minister hit me”. You can follow the story of how the book came into being on Brian’s blog.
When Brian Harris decided as a boy to give up his dream of being a newspaper cartoonist and instead become a photographer, it was a decision that would take him from 1960s Essex to the heart of the British newspaper industry in London and to dozens of countries in search of the images that encapsulate the decades from the 1970s to the present day. Some 200 of these photographs are featured in …and then the Prime Minister hit me… Presidents and royalty, ministers and movie stars, ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events; Brian Harris has captured many of the most famous and compelling people of our time. His honest, often hard-hitting text tells the story behind his pictures, and in so doing, the story of his life.
Drawn from his archive of thousands of prints, negatives and contact sheets, these images document not only Brian Harris’s 45 years as a photojournalist, but also many of the defining moments of modern history. As a staff photographer on The Times, his assignments included Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’, the bloody birth of Zimbabwe, the aftermath of war in the Falklands, famine and human suffering in Ethiopia and Sudan. He joined the founding team of The Independent in 1986, with a brief to produce the kind of purposeful editorial photography with which the newspaper became synonymous. His twelve years on the Indy coincided with the start of the civil war in Yugoslavia, the Tiananmen Square massacre, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Czechoslovakia’s ‘Velvet Revolution’ and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.
Aside from such headline-grabbing events, the daily grind of politics has given Brian Harris some of his most memorable images. Caught here on campaign trails, at party conferences and glad-handing the public are presidential candidates, British prime ministers and party leaders – including the unforgettable moment when Labour’s Neil Kinnock took an unplanned dip at Brighton beach.
The personal stories that illuminate Brian Harris’s photographs are a valuable social document of the changing face of the British newspaper industry experienced from the inside. From the heavily unionised working practices of the 1970s, through the post-Wapping fallout that gave birth to The Independent, to life as a freelancer, Brian has seen it all. …and then the Prime Minister hit me… is in part a tribute to ‘Fleet Street’s finest’, who taught the young photographer the tricks of the trade. But this book is dedicated to Brian’s father who built him a darkroom and his mother who made his first flyer for his fledgling photography business back in Romford. Without them, there would be no story to tell.
If you want to know more, please visit Impress Publishing’s website

Self-publishing 'Coast People'

Ian Forsyth


As I write this post sitting at my desk in my home office I am surrounded by an ever-increasing collection of photography books. Books that I have been gathering over many years firstly as an amateur with a keen interest and now as a working professional photographer. Over these years and I assume like many other photographers I have always found that seeing a photograph in the printed form is indeed a wonderful thing. Whether it was a print that I made myself in a basic but functional darkroom at the start or then later in the digital world as a print came rolling unceremoniously out of an inkjet printer tethered to my laptop it was still a great feeling.

The photobook is an extension of that.

A way of seeing the work of photographers I admired and the kind of work I was interested in. Looking over the titles surrounding me I see familiar names that have inspired me through my photographic career. Names like Tom Stoddart, Don McCullin, Larry Burrows, Philip Jones Griffiths, Robert Capa, Jane Bown, Robert Frank, Robert Doisneau, Weegee, Bresson, Sean Smith….the list goes on. All of them offer ideas and inspiration to the photographer and provide an insight into a time and place in history and of course it goes without saying they provide fine examples of photography. So as a photographer one of my ambitions was always to have my own book of photography. To have my work printed and have something that I could be proud of and which I would be happy to have in my collection.

My journey into publishing has been an adventure to say the least. It’s been quite a stressful undertaking. It has been financially challenging and it was a long process that at times nearly reached the point where I simply let it go thinking it was too much of a task to take on. As my collection of rejection letters from publishers increased I thought that the idea of having a book picked up by a publisher was pie in the sky so when I received a letter saying that a publisher was interested I was all ears! Now we’re not talking Steidl or Thames and Hudson here! I’m not talking about an international publishing house knocking at my door! This was a decidedly smaller affair and one that would result in only a small run of books. To try and generate interest and arrange with bookshops that would be willing to stock the book meant I had to be very proactive and most of the publicity for the book fell upon me.

Things were going well. Layouts were all done. Captions were written and pictures decided upon. I had approached some local media and started to generate some wider interest in the book. I provisionally secured nearly thirty orders in one day just by posting it on social media. I had spoken to my friend, a photographer who’s work I admire greatly, Tom Stoddart, who kindly agreed to write the introduction for the book and all was going well. But problems arose when I saw the quality of the prints in the book. They weren’t what they should be. Not for a good quality photography book.

Now I was under no illusions about this book. I had no thoughts at all that this would make it into the collection of the world’s great photography books! I’m not under any impression that this small addition would make a difference to the world of photography as a whole. But that wasn’t the point. This was my book with my pictures in and so I wanted it to be right and I wanted it to be printed well. So after a few weeks of trying to work through the problems with the printing it became clear that it wasn’t going to get resolved and I had to look for an alternative way of doing it. Now I’ve self-published a couple of one-off books before through the online company ‘Blurb’. So I knew that the quality was very good and at least with the template style options available there were plenty of ways of making the book my own and which gave me some creative freedom when I put it together. So I found myself going down the route of self-publishing to try and get this book off the ground. After a re-design and a change in layout I eventually had a finished copy that looked how I wanted it to look.

Now the financial outlay of self-publishing is one that shouldn’t be underestimated. Unless you have a few thousand quid put aside it’s an uphill struggle. So much so that the costs of producing a number of copies was, for me anyway quite prohibitive. I could have waited for a couple of years or whatever until I had enough money put to one side to allow me to produce a few thousand copies off but let’s face it…when do any of us get to the point when we ever have enough money to do something like that. Sometimes you just have to go for it and see where it goes. So my book, ‘Coast People’ was released on-line through ‘Blurb’ last month. It represents the culmination of a long-term photography project that I had been working on for around 5 or 6 years and is a visual document of something that I’m passionate about and which I have access to all year round. It looks at the coastline between an area called South Gare at the mouth of the River Tees in Cleveland and down the coast to Flamborough Head in North Yorkshire. With the book I’ve tried to show the people who live or visit and who use the coastline for recreation, sport and business or simply as a means to get a break away from whatever they usually do. My approach was to look for the simple, the quirky or the humorous. Some are posed portraits whilst the majority are just ‘as they happened’ without interference from me and which I hope, as a documentary photographer might form some part of a visual record of how people use the coast and which might help promote the heritage of the area and ultimately help protect it.

So only time will tell if it achieves this. But all the comments I have had back so far from those that have bought it have been very positive and as far as self-publishing goes? Well as a working photographer the financial aspect cannot be ignored in anything we do. The pursuit of a fair wage for what we produce is ignored at our peril and as professionals none of us should ever work for free! Occasionally however the challenges of taking on a self-publishing task might bring other rewards that might as yet not be immediately obvious. It can bring an understanding that in this oppressive digital age the production of a book of photography is a real-time extension of the digital world we now live in. A book has form. It has texture and feeling. It is a collection of pictures chosen over many months by the photographer and a collection that has been put together with pride and commitment. It is also quite addictive! I am also releasing a high-quality magazine at the start of December that shows a selection of my feature stories and documentary work from through the year. Called ‘Room 2850’ – after my blog of the same name – I hope to produce twice a year showing more of the stories I photograph.

So maybe give it a go? Turn that long-term project that has been simmering away for a few years into something tangible, something that can be held and looked at many times. Maybe a few copies will sell or maybe thousands will be bought but at the very least it is something which can stand alongside all your other photography books but which can claim to have the one thing none of the other books have…you made it.

 

You can get the book from Blurb here and you can see more of Ian Forsyth’s work here

 


           
The Hut
Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert


‘The Hut’, six simple letters making two words, but which in the Borders region of Scotland , and in particular in Hawick, conjure up images of men linking arms, swaying, singing, drinking and 500 years of remembrance and history.

I’ve photographed all over the world, in many exotic locations, from the jungles of Papua New Guinea to the boardrooms of Tokyo, but on returning to live in Scotland in the last few years I’ve begun to explore once more my own country, an exploration which during my recent ‘Unsullied And Untarnished’ book project, looking at the Common Riding festivals of the Scottish Borders, took me inside ‘The Hut’.

The event was the ‘Curds and Creams Repast’, a morning event at the Hawick Common Riding, an annual festival which commemorates the capture of an English Flag in 1514 and the ancient custom of symbolically checking the boundaries of the common lands. On the hills above the town, the riders approach the Hut, the men jump from their horses leaving youths to tend them, and run for the wooden farm building. The event is ticketed, and to some visitors surprising in that it is a male-only event. While the riders enjoy their hour or so inside, the female riders and participants of the Ridings mill around outside, listening to the proceedings over speakers.

Inside, men from the various Border towns representing other Common Riding festivals sit at long benches. Speeches are made and listened to, traditions are observed, songs sung, and copious drinks of rum and milk consumed.

I’ve been fortunate to gain entry twice to photograph, my presence tolerated if not exactly welcomed. Although visitors are welcome at the Common Ridings, these are essentially local festivals for local people. But photographing in the hut, with the condensation forming on my camera lens, the sweat dripping, the air humid with the heat, song and perspiration of 200 horsemen, stands as one of the more fascinating things I’ve witnessed in my own country, and certainly is proof that you don’t need to take off for foreign climates to see extraordinary sights and experience life.

Incredibly, even here in Scotland, the Common Ridings are little known outside of the Borders. With my latest project, Unsullied And Untarnished, out now as a book of the same title, and which also forms my part of a new show by Document Scotland photography collective, I hope others can gain an insight into the annual festivals, to learn about the pride and love the participants have for their communities, their traditions and the history of this country.

Unsullied And Untarnished book, with a foreword by photojournalist Harry Benson CBE and essay by Alex Massie, is available from Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert’s website. www.jeremysuttonhibbert.com

Unsullied And Untarnished forms Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert’s contribution to Document Scotland’s The Ties That Bind photography exhibition, on now until 24th April 2016 at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland.

www.documentscotland.com

©Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert. 2015.

[email protected]

 


       
Sir Harold Evans – interview
Graham Harrison






The book Pictures on a Page by Sir Harold Evans is widely considered the definitive text on photojournalism, layout and picture editing.

Voted the all-time greatest British newspaper editor by British journalists in 2001, Evans made his name at the Northern Echo and at the Sunday Times, which he was editing when he wrote Pictures on a Page in 1978. What is less well known among photographers is that Pictures on a Page was just one in a series of five text books he wrote for working photographers, journalists and students. “Everything we knew… we knew it because of Harry,” said Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, in 2013.

When Graham Harrison, a member of The BPPA, met the 87-year old at the Media Space in May he found his interest in photography was as great as ever.

As is his recognition of the dangers that photographers encounter. In his forward to Five Thousand Days, published by the BPPA in 2004, Evans wrote that press photographers “cannot move in the shadows, as can the reporter. These digital days, getting a picture back to the newspaper is not the nightmare it used to be, while the risks in taking a picture at all have multiplied”.

A feature documentary about Evans’ investigative journalism, ’Attacking the Devil: Harold Evans and the last Nazi War Crime’, directed by Jaqui and David Morris makers of McCullin (2012), premieres in January.

You can read Graham Harrison’s article on Photo Histories.





       
Election 2015 – Never Mind The Deja Vu
Back in 2005 The BPPA put together a project called “Never Mind The Ballots” which was a response to the “most stage managed, spin driven and least visually interesting elections in modern times”. Press photographers faced a month of ten minute photocalls and long frustrating waits whilst trying to find interesting and journalistically significant images. Ten years later the sense of deja vu was only diluted by the fact that things had actually become worse.

Because of that, we decided to run Election 2015 – a partner to the 2005 project to show that the ingenuity and skill of press photographers haven’t faded. The gallery is now on line HERE and if you like it please share it, tweet it and make sure that as many people as possible see what lengths we have to go to to get the pictures that actually tell the story.


          
Our Draft Code
 

Immediately after the Leveson Inquiry we started to think about how a code of conduct could be drafted for The BPPA that would help prospective members and the British public understand what our profession is all about.

We looked at similar documents from all over the world and we looked at the various codes of conduct and practice that our clients have already signed up to. It has been a massive task and we are proud to unveil what we are calling the “Final Draft” which was approved at a Board meeting last week. Here is the code in full:

The British Press Photographers’ Association Code of Conduct

Members of The British Press Photographers’ Association are professional photographers concerned with taking, editing and distributing news, feature, sports and other editorial photographs. Their work is predominantly for the British news media. The photographers take every care with their work, but it remains the responsibility of publishers to carry out checks concerning accuracy, damage to reputation, and the will of the Courts.



Press photographers should:


    

  1. Observe the highest ethical, technical and creative standards. They should conduct themselves in a manner reflecting those standards and be aware that their actions, both positive and negative, reflect on the profession as a whole
    2. 

  2. Not materially alter their images, or edit them in such a way as to give misleading impressions of news events
    3. 

  3. Provide accurate and comprehensive caption information
    4. 

  4. Resist any offers of payment or other inducements from third parties involved in the story to change the way they approach the coverage of news events
    5. 

  5. Remember they are subject to the laws of any country they work in
    6. 

  6. Always be aware of the codes of conduct observed by their employers and clients and act appropriately when working on their behalf
    7. 

  7. Treat people they meet in the course of their work with respect and dignity, giving special consideration to anyone suffering the results of war, crime or other difficulty or hardship
    8. 

  8. Protect their own intellectual property and respect the property of others
    9. 

  9. Defend media freedom, and the right to work in a fair and unfettered manner
    10. 

  10. Feel able to refuse any work involving excessive or unnecessary risks to themselves or others
    11. 



Ten clauses that sum up how we should behave rather than a set of absolute rules. This is important because we live in an age where there are lots of blurred lines and where each of us may well be doing a wide range of work for which each of these clauses will have greater or lesser significance. PR and hard news are very different and it is important that you read the Code with that in mind.

You will probably have questions about the wording and why it does and doesn’t feature X or Y and we are more than happy to answer those questions. We anticipate the most common query being about why it doesn’t have more specific rules and the answer there is in clause 6:

“Always be aware of the codes of conduct observed by their employers and clients and act appropriately when working on their behalf”

This is important because it refers to the IPSO Editor’s Code for those working for newspapers and other codes for magazines, broadcasting both in the UK and around the world.

According to our constitution this code can come fully into force once it has to be approved at a General Meeting and the next one is scheduled for the 4th of June in London.


             
The Darkroom Boy – 40 years on Fleet Street
Roger Allen
 

A peek into life in the glory days of Press Photography from the perspective of Fleet Street legend Roger Allen. An auto-biography illustrated with fantastic photographs from around the world by the former Daily Mirror staffer, with tales to make you cry with laughter including the infamous John Major ‘mooning incident’ and stories from the war zones of The Balkans to really scary battles of wits with showbiz celebrities. NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.

Find a comfy chair and crack open a bottle of Rioja.


“The Darkroom Boy is the story of a lad from a poor council estate whose working life was destined to be spent on a building site slapping glazed tiles on the walls of bathrooms and toilets. A chance meeting with his old art teacher in the early 70’s sent him on a different path… jetting round the world covering some of the biggest news stories of the late twentieth century as a newspaper photographer.


In the process, learnt a great deal about life, death, celebrity and how to behave at the awards ceremonies where he was twice crowned British Photographer of the Year.


He drank with Ollie Reed (copiously) tracked George Michael in the Hollywood hills, hunted showbiz fat cats like Michael Barrymore in America and real life lions on Woking high street. He travelled with John Major (exposing the parts that should never be mentioned let alone seen).


He also dodged bullets in war and peace, from Bosnia to Belfast and from Kosovo to Cape Town.In spite of this he still kept a sense of humour and an innate sense of right and wrong. This is the story of Roger Allen and his journey from a news agency run by two northern hacks who punted stories and pictures to the daily papers to the heights of his trade.


Through the murky days of the darkroom- dipping and dunking prints and processing film before taking the train to London to be shouted at and abused by the great and good of Fleet Street as he delivered photos to picture desks of the nations papers. Press photographers are seen as heartless coves. But The Darkroom Boy tells a different story- one of heartbreak and love, joy and laughter, rib-tickling humour and spine-tingling fear. He shows compassion not only to humans but also bears – Just ask the one Roger saved in Bosnia.”


           
The 2015 General Election
The BPPA
 

It has been a while since we ran a major project. At a recent meeting of The Association’s Board we decided that the upcoming UK General Election would be the perfect opportunity to right that wrong. We are inviting all members of The BPPA to get ready to submit photographs for this project which will start off as a web gallery and then, all being well, become something more.

Back in 2005 we ran a very succesful project which ended up with the arresting title “Never Mind The Ballots”. It started out as a web gallery but then became an exhibition which showed at the Palace of Westminster and on board the SS Robin which was moored at Canary Wharf. The summary of that show said this:


“The images collected in ‘Never Mind The Ballots’ express the sheer banality of the May 2005 general election. But more than this, they demonstrate the skill and determination of BPPA members who were able to produce excellent photographs under such tedious and stultifying conditions.


This was one of the most stage-managed, spin-driven and least visually interesting British elections of modern times. An event during which the nation’s press photographers faced months of ten-minute photo-calls and frustratingly regular delays in their quest to find interesting and significant images. This exhibition is both a celebration of the achievements under such conditions and a critique of those monstrous circumstances themselves; proof that vital and arresting shots are there despite the adverse efforts of political parties to regulate and normalize content.”


We have the strong suspicion that nothing will have changed apart from even greater pressure on news photographers to supply pictures in greater quantities, to tighter rolling deadlines and against even greater efforts from the political party machines to control what we do.

Railing against that control is something that press photographers do well and this project is a great opportunity to show off those pictures – especially those that may never be seen elsewhere.

Watch out for some interesting and creative work.