Assignments is back – and not just in London!


The exhibition of the best of British press photography returns – and as well as the London show we are taking over the The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke on Trent for a whole month.
The opening night is Tuesday 23 July- and will run until Sunday 25th of August to coincide with summer holiday season.
We are doing things slightly differently this year – full details on the website – but here are the key facts:

  • Entries open on April 1
  • Entries close April 12th
  • Pictures taken between 31st August 2017 and 14th April 2019 are eligible
  • We have increased the maximum number of pictures you can enter to 10 this year
  • There is a £10 registration fee to help us pay for everything
  • There is NO framing fee this year – our friends at Canon and Fixation are very kindly picking up the bill for us!
  • We will be doing the “catalogue” and the “contact sheet” again
  • (every image entered makes the contact sheet – so you can choose your own favourites)
  • Everyone who enters gets a pair of invites to the opening night party!
  • The exhibition is open to BPPA members – but if you have lapsed or haven’t got round to joining you can do so now

Check out the Assignments website for the full rules and details of how to enter: https://assignments.thebppa.com
You haven’t got long – so get hunting through those hard drives now!!

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

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.
Jeremy@jeremysuttonhibbert.com
 

Some 'whining' at Carnival

Pete Maclaine


Pete Maclaine has photographed the Notting Hill Carnival many times. Here he describes one particular aspect of his quest:

Winston Churchill said, “If you find a job you love, you’ll never work again.” For me, the combination of press photography and the Notting Hill Carnival bring this quote to life.
A love of photography coupled with the vibrant imagery created by the artists and performers, along with the behavior of uninhibited revellers make this a win-win situation. Whether the sun is shining or the rain is torrential, there is always a fresh new picture to be taken. Of course there are also hundreds of obligatory shots that should be sent in, and already have been many times by photographers during Carnivals past. Although this can be tiresome the press snaps them up year after year.
Originality be damned! I have always set off to cover this event with one shot in mind. It has plagued me from the first Carnival I covered in 2010: ‘Embarrassed police officer with woman/women gyrating against him.’ I have seen this picture published a few times over the years but never managed to capture it myself. So for the last five years I have followed male police officers around for hours aiming to get this clichéd shot.
Exhausted, my clothes soaked through and covered in paint. Drenched Chamois leathers and face towels draped over my cameras. Hunched over from donkeying a heavy backpack around, and in a heightened state of awareness scanning everyone that comes within a few feet of the police. It is no surprise when a suspicious copper or two asked why I was skulking around? Answering their question has caused much laughter and a few have told tales of when this had happened to them. “I didn’t know where to look,” said one Sergeant from Croydon nick. Another officer suffered recall blush as he explained, “I did not want to push her away, so kept turning around in circles until she stopped.”
By 5:30pm on Bank Holiday Monday I gave up on my quest. I was hungry, probably the munchies from passive weed smoking. My legs were sore and my back was feeling the weight of my kit. I had once again enjoyed myself but enough was enough. I’d skip the clear-up operation this year and head home for Horlicks and an early night. I made my way along Kensal Road through the throngs of people dancing alongside the remaining floats about to set off around the parade route. Eventually I found an exit that leads to a footbridge over the Grand Union Canal onto Harrow Road.
Trudging up the walkway onto the bridge I heard a commotion on the road below. The sought after photograph responsible for years of expectation fatigue was finally taking shape. I hadn’t taken a picture since my decision to leave and the light had changed. I took a burst of 9 frames on my Nikon D3S with the trusty 70-200 and hoped for the best.
A quick scroll on preview revealed that I had at least four shots in focus. By this time the laughing policeman, straight outta Tower Hamlets, was making his way up onto the footbridge and his embarrassment grew as he realized I had captured the whole thing. I was ecstatic and tried to explain how chuffed I was but he looked at me like I was nuts. I realized you had to be there, in my head, to get it and stopped talking.
I was a bit put out when my daughter and my girlfriend, both way cooler than I, informed me that the dance is actually called ‘whining’ not ‘winding’ as I had captioned it. Nobody deskside pulled me up on it or pointed out how un-street I had been. When published, the caption read ‘dancing provocatively.’
I probably sent out more images over the two days of carnival than I should have, as I struggle with the concept of ‘less is more.’ Although many of them were used, most were bog standard. There were only two that I am proud of, the embarrassed old bill with the provocative dancer being one.
With this shot finally in the bag, heaven forbid next year I have to come up with something original.
 
 
 

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.

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.”

Anyone for Polo

Eddie Mulholland

I was covering The opening of The Field of Remembrance (the crosses with poppies laid every year by The British Legion) at Westminster Abbey, which this year was by Prince Harry, when I first heard about his trip to Oman and Dubai.The Telegraph’s Royal correspondent Gordon Rayner was down to go and I explained how happy I’d be to accompany him. A few forms later and I was on the list to go. Not a big list but a very manageable one for the Palace press office. John Stillwell from the Press Association, Chris Jackson from Getty, Time Rooke for Rex Features and Darren Fletcher from The Sun.
Harry was arriving on Tuesday night and I got there Tuesday morning having flown through the night. The arrival was pooled , covered by Tim and Chris but Darren and I still turned up at the rather plush hotel just in case we were allowed to crash the pool. We weren’t so we retired to the bar for a beer then met up with the others to travel back by minibus to the hotel we were staying in. It was “National Day” in Oman and the traffic was horrendous. All the locals seemed to be out in there cars wearing masks and hooting and beeping their way around Muscat. We ended up having to walk the last few hundred yards to our hotel which gave us the chance to take a few frames of the festivities. Everyone seemed really friendly, they were having a great time, though a few had had their exhausts adjusted to make a sound that was very similar to gunfire, which did throw one particular reporter to the floor of the bus when we heard it for the first time.
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The following morning was a 6am start for the minibus journey to Nizwa Fort. Charles and Camilla visited earlier this year and took part in some local tribal dancing involving swords so obviously we were crossing fingers for a repeat royal performance.
We retired for several coffees whilst we awaited Harry’s arrival and took the opportunity to take some pictures of some of the children and some of the locals who were waiting to meet the Prince.
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I did a combination of pictures on my iPhone 5S and my normal Nikon work cameras (D4S D3S and D3)
The picture of the man with the walking stick was then put through ‘Snapseed’ and ‘Instagram’…the version that looks warmer was not. I do like to use my iPhone for work pictures but I’d never have the guts to shoot an entire assignment on one….unless of course I was asked to.
A lot of photographers complain that filter Apps like ‘Snapseed’ and ‘Instagram’ make everyone capable of producing “great” photographs. I tend to disagree. If you haven’t got the right image there’s nothing an App can do for you. So far Apps can’t find a picture for you, yeah they can polish a turd but it’s still going to be a turd.
Apps are tools as is the camera on your iPhone. You still need to know how to use the tool to get the most out of it.
Anyway, Harry played ball. Not once but twice. He had a go on the sword then went for a tour , then had another go on the sword. Our local Omani embassy chap did a brilliant job of positioning the dancers in front of Harry twice. We all got what was required.
 
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The next day was going to be a long one. Harry was visiting The Grand Mosque in Muscat first thing then we were flying to Dubai followed by a bus-ride to Ghantoot Polo ground, Abu Dhabi, for Harry’s ‘Sentebale’ charity match. We were told all sorts of celebrities would be attending..in the end it was only Geri Halliwell and her new fiance that anybody recognised.
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We went home and Harry stayed to watch the Grand Prix…a few people cynically commented that that was in fact the reason for the visit.
Anyone for a pre-Christmas shopping trip to New York ?

Away day… to Poland

As if often the case in the era of multimedia news gathering I was recently despatched to Poland on a whirlwind visit to shoot stills and video. A British armoured Battlegroup have been taking part in war games with the Polish military entitled “Black Eagle” for several weeks and the press had been invited along to coincide with a visit by the Chief of the General Staff – General Nick Carter .
We had to be at the army base in Poland bright and early on Friday morning so our only choice was to fly late Thursday night to Berlin and then drive for the border – luckily only a two and a half hour drive. Our hotel for the night was literally a truck stop motel, with a bit of a Swiss chalet style thing going on, but being a 10 minute drive from our rendezvous point the following morning it was bearable .
Now, I have this thing as many of you probably do where I conjure up in my head a “ best case scenario” of what to expect on a job and then set myself up for disappointment . In this case I envisaged myself in a trench with a screaming corporal throwing smoke grenades as the tanks roared forward all shot on a 24mm …….
As if….. After being transported to the range with a host of other media from the likes of ITN, The Times (sans photographer) the BBC and a likeable but complete anorak from Combat and Survival mag we found ourselves on a Soviet era style viewing platform from where we were expected to shoot all our images. No chance of using a 24mm here !
The again they were going to be firing live rounds so probably was best to be have some distance between us. Luckily due to some advice from a former Telegraph colleague who now picture edits for the Army I had begrudgingly brought a 300 and an extender with me without which I would have been in deep trouble, but was still utterly under-lensed for the live fire part of the exercise .
3 (UK )Division on the largest joint military exercise since 2008 in Zagan Poland with the Polish 11 Armoured Cavalry Division.© Heathcliff O'Malley
3 (UK )Division on the largest joint military exercise since 2008 in Zagan Poland with the Polish 11 Armoured Cavalry Division.© Heathcliff O'Malley
3 (UK )Division on the largest joint military exercise since 2008 in Zagan Poland with the Polish 11 Armoured Cavalry Division.© Heathcliff O'Malley
Armoured vehicles including Leopard II tanks from the Polish 11 Armoured Cavalry Division 3 (UK )Division on the largest joint military exercise since 2008 in Zagan Poland with the Polish 11 Armoured Cavalry Division. ©Heathcliff O'Malley
Chief of the General Staff - General Sir Nicholas Carter . The 3 (UK )Division on the largest joint military exercise since 2008 in Zagan Poland with the Polish 11 Armoured Cavalry Division
I recently bought a Canon C100 video camera, which takes all my EF lenses, which has revolutionised video for me . I now no longer have to fanny about with a 5D taking bits on and off depending on whether I’m shooting stills or video with it’s built in ND filters and XLR inputs . I now have a dedicated video camera which can use all the lenses I have collected over the years . Mind you this doesn’t solve the issue of when to shoot stills and when to shoot video on an assignment where there are no second chances .
Once the demonstration started there was nothing I could do but go with the flow and let my instincts take over. My c100 was mounted on a tripod and as the Challenger II tanks burst out of the tree line I panned with them and when I felt I had enough moved to stills leaving the camera rolling . I continued in this fashion alternating between camera until the tanks were probably a 750m off in the distance shrouded by a cloud of smoke which only the muzzle flashes of their powerful guns could penetrate. At one point I even mounted the 300 2.8 on the c100 for a few long shots and the 1.5 crop factor really helped.
Afterwards we got to have a short walk about where I bumped into an old school friend I hadn’t seen in 30 yrs who is now a Brigadier and shot some short lens stuff of soldiers and officers that made a huge difference. Finally there was an interview with the general and piece to camera with the reporter Ben, whom I had worked with a lot over the years and has now gained the confidence needed to stand in front of a camera, a skill which is not to be underestimated.
After a quick edit, caption and send of the stills we jumped back into the hire car for the drive back to Berlin with only around five hours before our flight was due to depart forcing me to edit whilst Ben drove down the dual carriageway westwards. The stars we clearly in alignment that day as miraculously my 4g mifi worked flawlessly (never usually does when it really matters!) and was able to file the video before going through to departures and the luxury that awaited with our Easyjet flight back to Gatwick .
See the video here https://vimeo.com/113108829