Appreciating the work of press photographers

©PA Jane Barlow. HM Queen Elizabeth II waiting in the Drawing Room before receiving Liz Truss for an audience at Balmoral, Scotland.

To launch the re-design of this site this piece by Karen Kay, which was originally posted on social media, has been reproduced here with her permission. Karen is a broadcast and print journalist who has worked on national newspapers, magazines and as a TV and radio, correspondent, presenter, producer and pundit for 30+ years. She now runs Shoot the Messenger, a media training and communications coaching business, and is married to a long-standing member of The BPPA.

Many of my friends and professional colleagues have talked fondly of this image, probably the last portrait of our Queen, taken by Press Association photographer Jane Barlow at Balmoral as she awaited the arrival of Liz Truss, to invite her to form a government.

Do read this piece. Appreciate the work of press photographers. Full disclosure: I’m biased, I am married to a stalwart snapper, and have long observed that he and his talented colleagues across the industry are rarely given the credit they deserve. At editorial meetings, industry parties, media awards, leaving dos, on front pages and inside spreads, it’s most often the scribes who are lauded, with photographers the unsung heroes who bring our words to life or whose work stands alone to tell a thousand words.

They often operate in the most challenging circumstances, given moments to work in an unfamiliar, sometimes hostile environment, or a setting chosen by someone else, often without consideration to background, light, composition and the comfort and character of the sitter. They work under immense pressure, often with hours of boredom then a few seconds to “capture the shot” required by a waiting newsroom, who often have a pre-conceived idea of what they are expecting. If a journalist misses a moment, they can write around it, glean anecdotes from others, sometimes report using news footage from the comfort of a newsroom, their living room or a hotel room, but not a photographer. Miss it and it’s gone. From war zones to world events, from protests to political portraits, they most often the first to arrive and the last to leave.

The last couple of days have highlighted the timeless power of a beautifully composed photograph. Whether it’s a news image documenting an event or a significant moment or a posed portrait, a still captures a split second that resonates in a way that video footage doesn’t. We can pore over detail and bask in the stillness. Almost everyone I know, and every business sharing public condolences, has shared images as a mark of respect on social media (almost certainly breaching copyright law), because a particular image or set of images resonates with their memory of a much-loved monarch.

It was extremely telling that, across the TV news broadcasts announcing the Queen’s death and in the hours that followed, so much of the coverage relied on photographs rather than filmed images of the late monarch. And, of course, the front pages and content of newspapers the following day, that still provide a starkly memorable punctuation mark in history, often bought as souvenirs of a watershed moment.

TV footage (& other filmed material) is valuable as a document, and tells different stories, but it has been wonderful to see people appreciate some truly exceptional photographs taken by the greats, such as Cecil Beaton, Snowdon, Lichfield, et Al, plus an extraordinary portfolio of work by press photographers over the years, including the delightful portrait by the late Jane Bown, formerly of the Observer, who was commissioned to mark the Queen’s 80th birthday with a private sitting, when she herself was 81. The radiant, serene black and white image released to announce the monarch’s death was from that session.

I have heard so many people – from royal pundits to friends – remarking on their favourite pictures of the Queen, discussing the candid moments of her with her horses or at the races, showing a contented woman with a beaming smile, or the exquisite frames of a young princess, dressed in swathes of couture silk satin by Norman Hartnell. Then there are the poignant ones that time stamp more painful moments – how can we forget that heart-rending frame of a frail, mask-clad widow sat alone, grieving in St George’s Chapel at the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral. I urge you all to acknowledge and remember how valuable and important good photography is as a document – easy to forget now we all have an iPhone and 15,000 – often mediocre – images in our pockets.

An open response to a recent social media post about gender in press photography

The BPPA has come in for some criticism from a group called Women Photographers of the UK about what they refer to as the uneven representation of women in the current Assignments 2019 exhibition. You can read their open letter here on Medium. This is a response from Lynne Cameron, Vice Chair of The BPPA.
 
Dear Suzanne, Anna and Susannah
 
We would like to reassure those expressing concerns about the representation of women in our industry that we are very aware of the issues and are currently working on projects to support and help current and future female members of the organisation. We were disappointed that these concerns were not directed to The BPPA in the first instance as we welcome all constructive criticism. It is one of our core values to work transparently with all parties in any matter related to photography.
 
The issue of gender imbalance is a complex one, not just related to photography but to wider society.
 
The association is proactively working to improve such imbalances. As an example The BPPA elected me as Vice Chair and Julie Edwards as our Social Media and Website Editor at last year’s AGM. We are both long-standing professional photographers who have first hand experience of gender related issues within our industry. Julie and I are bringing our experiences, energy and ideas to The Board and welcome further positive constructive comments which could help address this wider topic.
 
In relation to the exhibition (it is not a competition) we would like to reassure those concerned that images were curated by highly regarded members of the profession who were deliberately not given any information about the name or gender of the photographers in order to make the selection process ‘about the images’ as far as is humanly possible.
 
We are extremely proud of Assignments – an exhibition designed to promote and highlight the amazing work that is being produced by our members.
 
The Board of The BPPA welcomes constructive input from anyone who wants to help to promote and inspire great photography. If you have ideas on what more can be done on the issues raised then please get in contact with me or any of the other members of our Board.
 
Lynne Cameron
 
Vice Chair, The BPPA
 
 
 
Statistics:
 
1. The BPPA has 321 paid-up members of whom 40 are women – which is approximately 12.46%.
2. 16 photographers joined or rejoined in order to take part in Assignments 2019 of whom 25% were women.
3. 161 photographers entered photographs for Assignments 2019 of whom 18 were women – 11.2%
4. 1,351 photographs were entered of which 148 were entered by women – 10.95%
5. 110 photographs were selected for exhibition of which 10 were by women – 9.3%

EU Copyright Directive to be debated in European Parliament

Tomorrow (26th March 2019) MEPs will vote on a controversial EU directive to copyright work used on the web. It sets terms and conditions for others to reuse content (posted by people like us) commercially.
The battle has been between the tech giants, whose business model is all about reusing other’s intellectual property without license or renumeration, and us ‘the creative community’.
Scares have included that ‘readers will be unable to share links’ (wrong) or ‘Wikipedia will collapse’ (nonsense). Many of us have had content stolen by others to market their photographic services from our clients’ own media sites, and now Publishers’ Right (Article II) in the directive will allow us to chase our payment, which should stop many thefts. It should allow a revenue stream that before was tricky to say the least.
As Angela Mills Wade, the director of the European Publishers Council is quoted, “a vote for the directive will be a vote for fairness, for culture, for creativity, and crucially, for the future of Europe’s professional, diverse independent press.”

Alamy – a follow-up

The UK Press Gazette quoted The BPPA’s open letter to Alamy’s CEO in their piece about his video signalling his intention to reduce the photographers percentage of royalties to 40%. This morning the UKPG asked us to provide a response to James West’s latest video where he offers to keep the 50% split for exclusive content. We provided the following text:
 
“Alamy’s move to alter their commission structure has brought a large number of other issues to the surface such as the low prices they sell pictures for, their broken promise that when they reduced the photographers cut to 50% they wouldn’t go further and their somewhat grudging acceptance that it is the commitment and buy-in from thousands of photographers that has got them to the positive position in which they now find themselves.
 
The BPPA welcomes Alamy’s decision to reconsider their reduction in the percentage paid to photographers but in making this only for exclusive content they are still going to anger many of our members. One of them has said “exclusivity is appropriate to a delicatessen, not a Walmart” and this sums up how most feel.
 
Should they push ahead with this plan the details of how they manage this will be complex. Will photographers have to make some sort of declaration for every single picture retrospectively? Will the burden for proving exclusivity rest with the photographers? Our opinion is that Alamy are still not listening and are still cutting the income of all those photographers who for very good reasons do not wish to, or cannot, surrender exclusivity.”

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

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
 

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.”