Shooting portraits, travelling the world, capturing sports stars at the peak of their prowess – Nyla Sammons certainly keeps busy. A professional portrait and editorial photographer based in London, Nyla has been a regular face at Fixation for years and it’s always a pleasure to be updated on what’s going on with her latest projects.
Nyla was recently able to grab some time between shoots to chat to us for our latest ProFile feature. Read on to find out about photographing badass women, shooting the aftermath of the 2016 election in New York, and more…
Thanks for talking to us, Nyla! What are you working on at the moment?
I am currently working with a variety of clients on exciting briefs, and have a few lifestyle and portrait photoshoots coming up – all very top secret at the moment. I am also excited to be working on part two of my project, ‘Tough Women in Sport and Adventure’, where I get to meet and photograph incredible women who have gone beyond the ordinary to push boundaries and break world records in the world of sports and adventure.
When did you decide that photography was the career for you? What was the tipping point?
I worked in PR and marketing for about five years and as part of my marketing job, I was asked to take photos of some of the events we coordinated in the stores. I realised very quickly how much I enjoyed the art of taking good photos.
I knew working in marketing wasn’t fulfilling me anymore, so I decided to quit my job and enroll in a beginners’ course in photography, where I learnt how to move from automatic settings to manual. This began my journey – it showed me how to get so much more creative with what I was photographing, and opened my eyes to what was possible.
Your ‘Tough Women’ project is fantastic – truly inspiring images. Can you talk us through how that all came together?
Thank you, it’s actually the personal project I am most proud of to date. I met an inspiring lady called Kiko Matthews back in 2017 and photographed her press shots. At the time she was attempting to break the world record in becoming the fastest person to row the Atlantic solo whilst also raising £100,000 for Kings College Hospital. We stayed in touch, became friends, and I continued to follow her journey. Then in March 2018 after 49 days at sea, she finally made it and broke the record – how unbelievably badass is that?
I was so inspired and moved by Kiko and what she had achieved, I decided I needed to share it with others. I got in contact with Kiko and asked if she wanted to be a part of my portrait series called Tough Women in Sport and Adventure. Her excitement at coming on board then led me to contact other inspiring women. I was so honoured that so many of these women I contacted said yes and were so enthused about being a part of the project.
I photographed 10 women in total for the portrait series. I also contacted filmmaker Nathalie Baker and she did a great job in filming a short documentary to go alongside the photos.
For me, the project was about celebrating their achievements, showing the world what is actually possible, and inspiring other women and men.
Was there something specific you were hoping to capture or evoke with the Tough Women project? And do you feel you were successful?
I photographed the women in a studio environment where it was only them, with no distracting location, so people could really connect with them emotionally. I then photographed them in their natural environment, because I also wanted to tell their stories, bringing their passions into the frame.
The photos were exhibited in the beautiful Crossrail Place roof garden in Canary Wharf in March earlier this year, to coincide with International Women’s day, which felt hugely appropriate. My goal was to both celebrate the stories of these women and inspire other females to push themselves out of their comfort zones, seek out adventure, and ultimately live a more fulfilled life. I got a lot of great feedback from those that came to see the exhibition, as well as via social media; it was an incredible feeling to hear from women of all ages and from all walks of life about how inspired and empowered they felt by it.
I was also over the moon that Red Bull also featured the photographs and stories of these women online, to share with their readers.
I notice one of your commissions on your site was photographing New Yorkers after the 2016 election for the Independent, which must have been an experience. Can you tell us what that was like?
I’ve visited New York a lot, but when I went in 2016 after the presidential election, where Donald Trump came into power, I felt a very different vibe. There was a sombre mood in most neighbourhoods and people didn’t seem as friendly as I once remembered. I voiced my concerns to an actress and tour guide Rachael McKinney, and we had an in-depth conversation where I learned first-hand how badly people were being treated as a result of the new President.
Rachael spoke of a friend of hers: Angel Ortiz, who spoke of an old Caucasian man who purposely threw his shoulder into him as he walked by, calling him a spic, and saying he couldn’t wait until they threw him over “The Wall”. This was just one of the many stories Rachael told me that brought tears to my eyes. I wanted to share these stories and give those people of New York a voice. I felt more people should hear about what was really happening. I pitched the idea to the Independent in the UK, and thankfully they agreed!
Do you have a dream subject – something you’ve never photographed but would love to?
I have always had an interest in photographing forgotten tribes. I would love to meet them, live in their world for a bit and then document their lives. I have been watching ‘Walking the Himalayas’ with Levison Woods on Channel Four and I wouldn’t mind starting there…
What camera gear are you using at the moment? How does it help your photography?
I use a Canon EOS 5D Mark IV. I’ve been shooting with Canon since I started my career in photography, six and a half years ago. My lighting kit is Profoto, which I use in the studio and on location because it always produces such beautiful light, and as it is battery-operated, it’s easy to take out on the streets.
When I started I bought a lighting kit from a semi-cheap lighting brand, but I wasn’t very satisfied with it and so would come into Fixation regularly to hire Profoto lights and softboxes for client work. I was there so much that the main guy from Fixation rental would always be interested in how the shoot went (he was also the guy I would ask a million questions to) needless to say we became friends and when I had enough money I bought the Profoto B1 lighting kit with a whole load of softboxes!
Where’s next for you – what do you think (or hope!) the future holds?
I am working with brands more and more, which I love, and I want to continue growing my brand lifestyle and advertising portfolio. I have a real interest in sports and adventure after working on the Tough Women project, and was so happy to have been featured on the Red Bull website. In fact, it would be amazing to work with Red Bull again in the future.
Nyla Sammons was talking to Jon Stapley. See more of her work at nylasammons.com
For more than two decades, Louise Murray has been a freelance photojournalist at the forefront of issues around ecology, nature, environmentalism and science. She has traveled from pole to pole, the Arctic to the Antarctic, to shoot critical stories on the natural world, and Fixation has been proud to keep her gear in tip-top shape while she does it.
Louise is also a keen diver – a passion she shares with Fixation’s Mick Edwards whom she helped get his first drysuit – and she brings that love of the underwater world into her photography, where she has thoroughly explored the limits of underwater photography, not to mention her own endurance. We’ve featured some of her amazing stories on the blog before.
As Louise was resting between projects a couple of weeks ago, we managed to find time to chat with her about her career, travels and photography. Join us as we learn all about what it’s like to photograph in minus-40 temperatures, how Louise got deported from Canada, and what it is that keeps her coming back to diving…
Thanks for chatting with us, Louise! What have you been working on lately?
I had a month in the Philippines in March, and there was a whole lot of marine science stuff I was doing, including a piece for The Economist. I was also photographing thresher sharks – they are these very beautiful, quite elusive sharks, and the Philippines are one of the rare places you can reliably see them. I did some travel pieces, one just published that was about macro and macro lighting with lots of close-up photography.
I was also shooting fluorescence in marine life. You shoot it at night stimulating hidden pigments in the corals with blue light – I’ve been trying to get wide-angle shots for a couple of years now and finally succeeded. I think the Nikon D850 really made a difference, and the more powerful lights – it’s been a long time coming! I shot a funny little timelapse of the three of us trying to work together in pitch blackness with blue lights, trying to make the shot.
It’s very difficult. You start off on land, in daylight. You need expert divers with you who understand what you’re trying to do, and you have to have a full-on briefing before you even start. Often the local guide who’s with you has never experienced this and he doesn’t know what to expect, so you have to cover all this in your briefing. And then still it ends up being a bit of a nightmare as everybody works out how to work together in the dark without getting nailed by spiny, stingy urchins that come out at night.
Of course, you’ve done lots of marine work if I remember correctly?
Loads of marine stuff, loads of Arctic stuff, loads of Antarctic stuff. I’ve also been doing a lot of work with robots over the last two years, and they’re always challenging. Photographing them for stories about robotics – so whether that’s autonomous vehicles, or robots in horticulture, or robots in forensic science conducting autopsies. I went to Switzerland for that one. It’s a huge variety of different things, most of which are not on my website because I’m too lazy to update it!
I think this fluorescent stuff recently. I love diving, so I’ll take any excuse to do it. It looks like I’ve got another couple of big underwater projects coming up – for most of October I’ll be back in the Philippines, which will be great fun. Then back to Baja Mexico in November.
Sounds awesome! Are you hunting for anything in particular?
I’m doing an environmental story on the world’s biggest fish in the Philippines, then freediving with hunting Striped marlin in Mexico.
A lot of what you have covered in the past concerns ecology and climate change.
It’s been a while since I’ve written about climate change, but yes. I had a picture on the front page of the Guardian illustrating climate change. It’s a shot you can only get at a certain time of year; when the sea ice is melting, it melts during the day then refreezes at night. You get protruding blocks of ice forming where it has broken up and refrozen, and in early May those start to melt and drip during the day in earnest. If you get there at the right time and then shoot into the sun, you produce an image with a concept of sun, heat, and melting ice that encapsulates what is happening with the climate emergency in the Arctic. That’s why those particular sets of pictures do very well.
Are there other aspects of the climate emergency you would like to cover?
I would kill just to be back up in the Arctic, but I got deported from Canada. You have to try very hard to do that. I would very much like to be able to go back up to Nunavut, where I used to lead expeditions helping film crews make feature-length movies about wildlife up there. I was working illegally without a work permit. So I rocked up a year or two later thinking, “Well that’s all done and dusted, and now I’m here with several thousand pounds of commissions.” But the immigration officer didn’t see it that way, and they held me in immigration and sent me back on the next plane, which wasn’t very pleasant. Haven’t been back to Canada since.
So where else might you head instead?
I had to turn it down this year, but the Siberian Ice Marathon, where people run across the frozen surface of Lake Baikal. It clashed with the Philippines this year, but I’ll be going back next year. It’s great fun.
Once you’ve got the right clothes. It’s down to having the right gloves and the right boots. I’ve worked in minus-40 with the Danish military – that was an amazing job. In Eastern Greenland they have a unit called the Sirius Patrol – pairs of guys patrol with dog sleds over that uninhabited part of Greenland, right up to the extreme north to protect Denmark’s sovereignty over the land. That was an amazing cold shoot – quite painful, but not impossible.
I can’t even imagine how you’d take photos in those conditions.
You have to have a lot of batteries inside your coat. That’s the key thing. When we used film it used to freeze, but with digital, it’s the batteries. You can practically see the battery gauge going down.
I suppose digital has unlocked a few interesting possibilities in your line of work.
The marine stuff is much easier to do now than it ever used to be, because we used to go down with a tank of air and one roll of film, which was 36 or 37 frames if you were lucky. To change the film, you had to come back up, open up the housing, open up the camera, change it, and then go back down. And this is dangerous, because you don’t want to be popping up and down when you’re diving. You can’t do it repeatedly – it isn’t safe. So it’s marvellous to have high-capacity cards and be only limited by however long your air lasts. And the poor bastards who have to dive with me tend to find out just how long I can make a tank last!
What is it that keeps you coming back to diving and underwater shooting?
Well, it’s very calm down there. And no matter where you dive, even if you’ve dived somewhere a thousand times, it is still quite possible to go down and see something that you’ve never seen before. It still happens to me, after all these years working underwater – I can still go on a dive and see a behaviour or a creature that is entirely new to me, though not new to science. Although when we go to Indonesia in October, it’s possible that we’ll see stuff that is new to science!
We look forward to finding out!
Louise was talking to Jon Stapley. See more from Louise at her website: louisemurray.com
Over 45 years of hard graft in the press photography industry, Mauro Carraro has seen it all. His career has taken him from selling home-printed shots to South London newspapers for £1 a pop, to following the Royal beat and gaining an infamous reputation in the Buckingham Palace press office, to working on staff as one of the in-house photographers of the hairdressing chain Toni & Guy and later TIGI.
Mauro is also a keen archivist, and has spent much of the past few years digitising his extensive back catalogue, hich he has been using to produce books of his images – his recent adventures into publishing include the book Kempton Park Autojumble Motorcycles and Stuff: Celebrating 30 Years, available on Amazon and eBay. He’s been a regular face at Fixation for some time now, and we thought it a great opportunity to hear a little more about the story of his career and the journey he’s taken to get where he is today.
So, over to Mauro! Read on for stories of the glory days of Fleet Street, sneaking into film premieres, and being told off by the Queen herself!
Portrait of Mauro Carraro
Thanks for talking to us, Mauro. So talk us through how everything started out for you?
First I was a Saturday studio assistant for a wedding and passport photography studio based in Streatham in South London. In essence, I would help the main photographer there process the pictures he’d just done for his latest wedding, and get them back out the door so he could go back to the reception and sell prints to the old grannies who were there. He would come in and develop the negative, and then he’d go in and do some batch printing and I’d run it through the developer. We’d then give it a quick wash and a five-minute fix, and then to dry it, I would soak it in methylated spirits. After that I would head over to our little kitchen area where we had a naked gas flame, and I would burn off the methylated spirits. This meant most Saturdays I came home with my arms smelling of burned hair!
Later on when I was 17 or 18 I was at Croydon Technical College and some guys from the picture desk on the Daily Mirror came down to give all the students a chat. I remember Kent Gavin being there, and Freddie Reed, who was chief photographer at the time… they were telling us all these romantic stories of jetting off around the world, photographing wars and fashion shows and sport, and it was just seemed a very glamorous lifestyle.
When they were wrapping up their discussion, Freddie stood up and said:
“How many of you want to be press photographers?”
Obviously everybody put their hands up. So then Freddie said:
“Well, how many of you actually have your camera here now and carry it with you at all times?”
Literally two of us put our hands up! And that was it. That was when I thought to myself: Yes, I want to travel the world, and I want photography to be my vehicle for doing that
As a 16- or 17-year-old I’d already been doing bits and pieces for things like Streatham News, South London News, covering events like Tooting Carnival or the summer fair. Their staffmen didn’t want to work on weekends because they weren’t getting paid enough, so I’d get a pound for every picture I got published.
I was doing this when there was a robbery at the milk depot in Streatham. When the milk floats used to pick up their cash, they’d then come back and deposit it all at the same depot where they picked up their milk. And it got robbed! For quite a substantial amount. I was one of the first on the scene before they closed it all off, and after I got some pictures I thought: I know, I’ll see if there’s a national paper that’s interested . So of course the first national I went to was the Mirror, and they bought the picture.
There was a lot of camaraderie. Fleet Street was in its heyday – you had ten national newspapers all within walking distance of each other, so as a freelancer if I had a picture that the Mirror wasn’t interested in, I could walk around to the other papers and try to sell it to them. And that was what led me to try and create my own ideas for pictures. A lot of that was celebrity-driven, hanging around outside restaurant and theatre doors, and that was how I ended up getting a lot of my night-time shots. The Evening News would say “There’s a film launch tonight, would you go and cover it from outside?” because their staffer would have a pass and be on the inside. But, of course, me being the oik that I am, it wasn’t long before I was turning up in my dinner jacket, faking that I had a pass and sneaking into a lot of these events to get myself a much better set of pictures!
The thing was – in those days, if you turned up somewhere, wearing a dicky bow, with the intent of walking in, it was very few people who were brave enough to try and stop you! I have always been a confident bugger, and if you looked the part and acted the part, people tended to leave you alone.
When Lord Rothermere closed down the Evening News, I started wondering where I would get my daily shifts. I was still doing some stuff for the Mirror, and I remember one of the night editors saying to me, “There’s a young lady we think Prince Charles is most probably having a bit of a dalliance with, why don’t you go and hang around outside her place and see if you can get some interesting pictures of her?” Of course I’m talking about Lady Diana Spencer.
I ended up going to Earl’s Court, where she had her flat. There was a particular shot I was after for ages – her carrying her shopping home from the local Spar. I used to wait on the corner for her to come walking back, and one afternoon it finally came about. She got very nervous and put the carrier bags up in front of me so I couldn’t take a picture – but, being the cheeky chappie I am, I said: “Look, I’ll carry your bags home for you if, someday, when it doesn’t look too bad, you don’t mind letting me have a picture of you.” And that made her laugh – she saw the humour and the fun in it. It meant that later on when I started photographing her in earnest, she knew my name. This led to Rex Features realising that I had the capacity for getting into royal occasions when a lot of other people couldn’t, and so they asked me to do the royal beat for them.
Ten years! Ten years of travelling around the world, chasing them on skiing holidays or going on the royal tour. Eventually Rex was recognised as part of the royal rota, so I then started doing official visits as an official photographer with a proper pass. I think the Palace saw that as a way of trying to stop me being the nuisance that I used to be – as I always say to people, I used to be like a bad penny, always turning up at the right time. Basically if they were out shooting something or chasing something or doing something they shouldn’t have been doing, usually I would pop up.
Just at the point where someone’s thinking, “I hope nobody takes a photo of this.”
There I would be! I had a reputation of being the most hated man at the Buckingham Palace press office. It was with dread they would go into work in the morning, wondering what was on the front page that Mauro had gone and got a picture of.
I also had the distinction of being told off by every member of the Royal Family. I was always trying to find something different, looking for a different approach to the official pictures, and that led me to finding Prince Charles out fox-hunting. I didn’t realise it was him at first – I just saw a fox-hunter closing a gate and pulled up in my car, wound the window down and said, “‘Scuse me, have you seen –”, at which point Charles turns around and starts cursing at me like mad. I remember Prince Phillip up at Sandringham going off to shoot pheasants and swearing at us in French.
At Sandringham I also got told off by the Queen! Which, I have to say, wasn’t very clever of us at the time. We saw the Queen ride out with Diana – she went off onto a bit of private land, but we knew where the lane came out. So we ran round there in the car, waited for her to come out and got the first set of pictures. Then she went off into a private field, but we knew where that field came out! So we ran around there and did a second set. At this point we thought the Queen might be getting a bit annoyed, so we went back to the stables to wait with the rest of the public. But then Diana came back – she’d been riding on ahead – and we wanted pictures of Diana so we started shooting away like mad. I got to the end of my roll of film, and as I dropped that camera to pick up another, I noticed there was a horse’s head right next to mine, and on that horse was the Queen, looking down at us. I started elbowing my partner – he just swears and curses at me because I’m jogging his elbow while he’s taking pictures. The Queen just waits for us both to stop and then says [launches into fairly decent Queen impression] “I think you’re so rude!” And then she just trotted off.
A few of us opened up a company that’s still running today called UK Press. There was a massive glut of photography agencies that opened up, mainly driven by the fact that there was an enormous amount of newspaper being printed. But we were entrepreneurial – we’d do things like go off and shoot a feature, process it, duplicate it, and then rush to the airport. We had the timetable of all the flights going to different European cities – we’d beg passengers to take our sets with them, and our agents in the other countries would meet them at the airport, take the pictures and sell them.
We represented about 20 photographers, and I had this whole circle of contacts I would sell pictures to. It was a bit like going to a car boot sale to a certain degree, you would go and hawk your wares to various different people. And because my in-roads into colour were a long way ahead of other photographers, I was turning up with material that was much sought after.
It’s still happening today, you know! Last week I got a call from the Mail for some of my Diana pictures, simply because all of the agencies that used to have Diana pictures have been gobbled up by Getty, and everything they’ve got has already been seen, and there’s stuff there that was scanned five or six years ago and the quality is really inferior to the scanners I’m using at the moment.
You’re doing quite a big archiving project at the moment, aren’t you?
With all of the agencies swallowed up by Getty, it’s all become very homogenised, and I think anybody who wants to go look for something unusual and different is bored – fed up with seeing the same thing over and over. I think any photographer who’s managed to curate their library stands to make themselves some income.
And that’s on top of your day job at TIGI [the hair-products company set up by Toni & Guy]
I’ve been there for 16 years. The agency feature work led me to magazines, doing studio portraits for TV programs and films people were trying to promote. Those portraits led to me being seen by friends of mine in the hairdressing business. The hairdressing business in this country has developed over the last 30 years into something massive – absolutely massive. Some very wealthy people have made a lot of money out of having chains of salons. Luckily for me, two of those people were brothers who came from Streatham, and they were called Toni and Guy.
They said to me, we want to open up a studio because we’re doing a lot of photography for the hundreds of salons we’ve got, and we want to go digital. Can you take us to the digital era? I got lucky – I found someone who gave me a staff job to learn how to be a digital photographer!
What was that transition like – was it difficult to go from being a world-travelling press photographer to an in-house studio man?
Funnily enough it wasn’t actually like that! Although we had the studio, TIGI was and is a global company, so I would be going to America, France, Italy, Hong Kong – all these different places to create photography and campaigns. The thing that actually struck me the most was having to work for the same people every day. Because I’d spent 25 to 30 years of my career waking up every morning wondering, “What am I going to do today? Who am I gonna make money out of? Where am I going to go?” And now I’ve spent 16 years with the same company.
Having said that, I am eternally grateful to them, because there are so many photographers from my era who are no longer in the business and don’t even pick up a camera any more, because they find this whole digital thing just too confusing for them. I’ve been very lucky.
I shoot something every day. Every day I’ll take pictures. Photographers are a bit like hairdressers – I think that’s why I work so well at TIGI – because every day they’re asked by their customers to create something to make them look beautiful, make them feel good, make them feel like a different person. And that’s what photographers do with their subjects – there’s nothing better than charming someone into doing something they wouldn’t normally do in order to get that picture.
I want to keep going with it and find new ways of keeping going with it, and that’s what led me to the motorbike book [Kempton Park Autojumble Motorcycles and Stuff: Celebrating 30 Years]. This was kind of an easy win for me. I’d spent the past ten years going to this motorbike event – because my other obsession, as well as cameras, is motorbikes – and I started doing Facebook pictures for them, giving them imagery to use, and before long I found I had about 5,000 pictures! And I’d been wanting to self-publish something, because although I’ve been publishing for TIGI for the last ten years their books, I had an urge to publish something of my own, with all the knowledge I’d gained from the print newspaper business and the print books business. I do see book printing very much like newspapers – as a dying art form. Although there does seem to be a slight resurgence.
It’s proven quite resilient. I feel like the decline has happened but we’ve hit the hard floor of people who will continue buying books no matter what.
I don’t think for one minute I’m gonna be a millionaire out of all the books I create – I’m not going to be the next Jeffrey Archer!
I’m still a big believer that a picture paints a thousand words. There’s no two ways about it. When you now look at social media – yes, everybody used to upload lots of videos to Facebook, but I think now the more popular way of disseminating information is to put a nice picture up on Instagram or Facebook. So photography and the photograph are very much still there. It’s very much the popular way of doing things.
And for the motorbike book, I already had all that material. I used Lightroom to create my dummy copy, then I hawked that dummy round to various people, and I got an advance order of 200 copies purely from that dummy. I’m now halfway through the amount we had printed, so I’m kind of hopeful that books aren’t dead yet. That there is still a future.
You do need to think of a book project as a three- to five-year investment. In this case it took me five or six years to shoot all the pictures, then another year and a half to edit and design it – I was also working full time – and it’s taken me another year to get it off the ground. And now we’re a year on since I brought it out, and I’m just starting to see the fruits of it. These fruits aren’t just financial – it’s getting invited to places, being asked to talk about things (a bit like we’re doing now!) and it’s about raising my profile. I’d like to carry on as a photographer until they put me in a box, but you have to keep reinventing yourself to do that. You have to move with the times. When digital first arrived, all my colleagues at the time went, “I’m never gonna change! I’m always gonna shoot film!” Well, if you’re not going to change, you’re not going to move forward. Photography has always been about technology – ever since Fox Talbot first started painting those bits of glass.
Mauro was talking to Jon Stapley. More from Mauro can be seen at www.maurocarrarophotography.com, and you can pick up his latest books at his Amazon author page. For Mauro’s fellow motorbike fans the next Kempton Park Autojumble is on the 20th of July.
Sport has its legends of course, but sports photography does too, and one character who could lay a serious claim to the title is Dickie Pelham. He’s been The Sun newspaper’s sports snapper for 30 years, and in that time he’s covered seven World Cups, six Olympic Games, numerous boxing finals and everything in between.
He’s showing no signs of slowing down either – this year he was crowned The Society of Editors’ sports photographer of the year for a fifth time, with his spectacular image of Dillian Whyte clocking Lucas Browne across the jaw in order to retain the World Boxing Council Silver heavyweight crown.
With Dickie’s incredible body of work soon to be immortalised in a book, published by Pitch Publishing, we caught up with him to talk camera gear, favourite Instagrammers and the recent dramatic football season…
Portrait of Richard Pelham
Dickie, thanks for talking to us! What have you been working on lately?
We are working on a book, A Life Behind the Lens, which comes out soon from Pitch Publishing. It’s 30 years of photography – it took a bit longer than expected to research the whole lot, but going back through the archives and finding all these negatives was brilliant. As a great friend of mine once said, our future is in our past.
Oh yeah. Euro 96, Gascoigne’s goal and things like that. There’s the Olympic Games from ‘96, which was my first Olympics. A lot of stuff has got lost as well, but they’re finding gems all the time in our reference library. They found the image of Roger Bannister doing the four-minute mile – I saw it as a glass plate. Incredible.
Yes. We tried at 20 years and couldn’t get anyone to touch it, but this time Pitch Publishing said “Yep, we’ll do that.” It’s football, boxing, cricket – all the stuff that I’ve done.
Are you keeping up with sport work as well as the book?
Yes, I’m working on an Olympic project. We’re covering seven athletes that are going to the olympic games – there’s Taekwondo, Judo, paralympic swimming, canoeing, a sprinter and I’m shooting a BMX rider tomorrow.
So are these portraits?
We’re doing portraits, we’re doing a composite where we put them all together, and then we’re also studio lighting each of their disciplines. I’ve done the gymnast studio-lit, I’ve done the swimmer underwater – that was great. I can dive as well, so while she was buzzing around on the surface I was shooting her from below. We’ve been using Elinchrom lighting and stuff like that – the gymnast was on the rings with lighting, the sprinter was outside with lighting, and hopefully the BMXer will be flying through the air with lighting tomorrow as well.
How does it feel when you’re shooting something like that, and you’re aware it’s a momentous occasion? Does that affect what you’re doing?
No. You’ve one hundred per cent got to put it out of your mind. You’ve got to stay professional and do your job. We talk about this in the book – remember when Beckham scored against Greece [in the 2001 World Cup qualifier]? He scores the goals, he runs and runs and runs, and he jumps in mid-air celebrating right in front of me. Now, okay I didn’t know at the time I’d win Sports Photographer of the Year with that picture, but then as he peeled away I remember thinking “Yes, we’re going to the World Cup!” and it’s great to know you’ve got next summer working. You’re going to a World Cup.
I guess that’s a nice perk if you’re a photographer and your national team wins a qualifier – that’s you sorted for the next few months
Even though I’m staff, I don’t take it for granted. I’ve done seven World Cups and six Olympic Games, but when my boss asks “Are you going to the Olympics next year?” my answer is, “Of course I’m going to the Olympics! I’m not doing all this work not to go to the Olympics!” You’ve got to look at it like that, especially in this industry with the way cutbacks are. You’re honoured to be going to these sorts of things. But when you’re in the front line, you’ve still got to get the picture to go with the story for the paper.
Do you have any dream subjects – stuff you haven’t shot but would like to?
There was one dream subject I would have loved to have photographed – Muhammad Ali in action, without a doubt, but I was too young for it. I’ve seen Lennox [Lewis], [Frank] Bruno, David Haye, Tyson Fury – I’ve seen five heavyweight champions of the world, one undisputed. Football is my major sport but boxing is brilliant – it makes for such great pictures.
Especially with cameras getting better and better – you must be able to get such good stuff?
You know, you say that – but even if you’ve got 20 frames per second on a mirrorless body, it’s still all about timing. That one frame I won Photographer of the Year with this year [Dillian Whyte versus Lucas Browne], it’s all about timing. At the end of the day it’s about getting that punch on the jaw.
You’re a Canon user if I remember correctly. What are you wielding these days?
I am using the EOS 1D X Mark II. I’ve also got the mirrorless EOS R at the moment, which they’re lending me. As a professional photographer, you’ve got to try mirrorless, because that’s the way it’s going to go. I’ve shot a lot of this Olympic project on the R, and it’s pretty good. I like it. I keep telling people it’s not there yet – everyone’s banging the drum for Sony, but in my view it ain’t there yet. I’m not slagging off Sony – I’ve used them, played with them, they’re not for me. I’ve also got Canon’s 600mm f/4 lens at the moment, I’ve just done a piece for someone on that. It is superb. So, so light.
They’re doing an amazing job of getting these lenses smaller and smaller.
And when you’re taking them on and off planes and carrying all the kit around, it makes a massive difference. Believe me.
It’s quite a contrast from the way things used to be – as you must have been reminded recently while looking at the plates for the book…
And we’ve had to get everything scanned, and there are no decent neg scanners out there anymore! We used to use the Kodaks and carry them on jobs with us. Now you can carry three or four bodies and remotes and an ethernet cable, and that’s it.
Is there any advice you’d give young, upcoming photographers today.
It’s a very difficult market for the young and upcoming right now, but I’d say this – don’t run before you can walk. People think that if they can get into a Premier League game then they’ve cracked it, they’ve made it as a photographer, but you’re always learning. I’m certainly still learning – I don’t know nearly enough about light and lighting. I’ve picked up loads of tips by following people on Instagram – Hannah Couzens is one.
She’s great, isn’t she?
I’ve learned loads from her. We have a bit of banter going – I’ve been to her studio a few times, I went to her talk at The Photography Show. She photographed me for my book and said she found it daunting – all I said to that was “You nailed that easily!” I picked up lighting techniques just from watching her!
There’s so much to learn, isn’t there?
I’m always learning – I like Glyn Dewis, he’s a master of Photoshop and lighting. Dave Clayton as well – his and Glyn’s podcast is called He Shoots, He Draws. I learn a lot from that – they interview photographers on there as well, and you can learn so much. I’ve got 30 years’ experience in the industry and I’m still learning.
Richard was talking to Jon Stapley. Richard Pelham’s book: A Life Behind the Lens: Thirty Years of Award Winning Photography from Sport’s Most Iconic Moments is out from July 29, 2019. You can follow Dickie on Instagram and Twitter, on both of which he is @DickiePelham
Almost 34 years ago a young Mark Allan grabbed a camera, lens and a few rolls of film and drove down to Live Aid, ticket in hand, ready to capture some shots. He couldn’t have predicted that was about to launch an illustrious and brilliant career in music photography, spending time among the stars and producing unforgettable images of such renowned artists as David Bowie and Amy Winehouse.
Now, more than three decades down the line, his work is being honoured at London’s Barbican (where he is a regular photographic contributor) with a new exhibition of some of his most iconic prints.
When he’s not hob-nobbing with music royalty, however, Mark is a regular face at Fixation, and he graciously agreed to spare a few minutes to chat with us about photography, the exhibition, and his time behind the lens….
Thanks for talking to us, Mark. What have you been working on lately?
Let’s see – I’ve been dealing with my exhibition. I’ve got a contract with the BBC, so I work regularly at Maida Vale – last week I did Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes, who were amazing. I recently photographed Jenna Coleman, who was on Doctor Who and is playing queen Victoria on ITV, as she was on the Graham Norton radio show. I also photographed Ian Wright last night – he’s going to be doing an FA Cup show on Radio 1. What else? An interesting band called the Psychedelic Porn Crumpets. The minimalist heartthrob Philip Glass doing the Bowie Symphonies at the Royal Festival Hall last week. I do a lot of classical music because I work using Nikon’s silent-shooting mirrorless cameras – bought from Fixation of course!
Wow, you’re very busy!
Really, really busy. And I’ve got the whole of the weekend booked to cover Sound Unbound for the Barbican, and I’m trying to get to Photo London tomorrow to go around and talk about the exhibition.
The exhibition is looking fantastic. What are some of your personal favourite shots from it?
I like the shot of Bowie in the deckchair, which they chose as the cover image. It had just been sitting in my collection of photographs, and I’d been thinking “Oh, one day I’ll do something with that.” I also like the Prince ones, and the shot of Amy Winehouse in the orange dress backstage.
I remember waiting for about four hours to get that picture – I had set up my lights and was waiting and waiting. I had no idea whether she’d actually come out of her dressing room and pose before she went on stage. In the end I got about three minutes with her before she got bored and walked off!
You’ve shot lots of portraits of such iconic people. How do you approach these shoots – do you plan meticulously or head in with an open mind and see what works?
The key word is “quick”. When you’re backstage, you’re competing with everything and everyone – soundcheck, hair and make-up, all the journalists queuing up to interview the star. Also, you don’t want it to look like a polished photograph in a studio, because that’s a different thing altogether. If you try, all you’re going to end up with is a third-rate, studio-like shot. Instead you want to show that it’s backstage, so you do it on a staircase, or on tour boxes, and that’s what gives the viewer the feeling that they’ve got privileged access. It is a different kind of portraiture, I think – it’s location portraiture rather than studio portraiture.
It has a different vibe.
A different vibe, and different equipment too. You’ll use battery-powered lights because you never know whether you’re going to be in this country or abroad, and therefore whether you’re going to have power, so you’ve got to be able to run a couple of lights regardless.
What have been some of your most memorable shoots?
One of the most memorable for me was photographing Live Aid. I just bought tickets up in Manchester where I was a student, drove down with a mate, parked the car up, stood in the queue, and when the doors opened I ran down to the front, stood there and waited for it to happen. For the whole concert I had seven rolls of black-and-white and one roll of colour, and I saved the colour for the finale.
I just had a 135mm lens and a 1.5x converter, and this meant that when Bono jumped down into the audience and pulled a girl out, that famous moment, she was right in front of me, but all I could get [on that focal length] was a tight headshot of Bono putting his arms out!
It was very, very handy to do that just as I decided I wanted to become a photographer and was applying to Goldsmiths. They accepted me, and while studying there I became picture editor of London Student, and that led on to photographing more and more bands in London, and that led on to work at the Daily Mirror and then a freelance career from then onwards.
The industry has changed quite a bit since then…
The biggest thing, I think, was the change from film to digital, though the first big change was from black-and-white to colour, which happened about two years after I started. The change to colour was interesting because it got me my first cover of the NME. I’d taken a picture at Finsbury Park of Morrissey waving a Union Jack around, and the NME photographer had turned up and shot it in black-and-white. But, of course, it was a picture of the Union Jack, so they wanted it in colour. That got me on the cover.
And then, at about the millennium, around 1999, it was the second generation of Nikon with the D1x, and at that point you just had to go digital. I’ve been digital ever since.
Did you resist it for a while?
It was just really expensive. When they first came out, digital cameras cost about the same as what they do now. It was like three or four thousand pounds for a digital camera, which back in 1999 was very very expensive. A normal film camera would cost you about £400.
This meant you had to actually have something that made it worth it, and at that stage I was the on-set photographer for Top of the Pops, which was filmed on a Thursday and brought out on a Friday. If you were shooting digitally, you did actually have time to transmit a shot and get it out in time for the next day’s papers. So that was why I adopted digital, and within about two months of buying my digital camera, I had paid for it.
It paid for itself.
Yes. I’ve been digital ever since, and I’m a real advocate for it. Whenever I talk to students, they invariably tell me “Oh yes, but film’s so much better, there’s more latitude, it looks nicer, it’s a better product.” Not for what I do it ain’t! You try pushing 400 ISO film to 3200 or 6400 ISO – it just doesn’t bloody work. And when you’ve got clients saying they want the pictures yesterday, you can’t do it any other way. Each to their own – if you want to go photograph landscapes on an RZ camera, fine – I can see the point in that. But not for what I do. Not for rapid-reaction press. You’ve got to have really good-quality digital
What is your setup at the moment?
I’ve got one Nikon D5 left and two Z 6s.
The new mirrorless cameras! How are they?
For what I do, they’re perfect. The autofocus isn’t quite as quick as the D5, so if you’re walking around doing party pictures or backstage shots you’re better off with the D5, which is why I still keep it. But if you’re doing other things I also do – classical concerts or working in a tv studio – it’s ideal. I was in the studio with Ian Wright last night, and throughout the entire interview he was doing I was clicking away, but you couldn’t hear a thing because the camera was mirrorless. You can do stuff you just simply could not do before.
And so you use an adapter and F-mount lenses?
Yep. You can’t tell the difference in terms of quality; it just makes every lens an inch longer. So if you’ve got a 24-70mm it does make it quite a long-looking lens. I assume that as I carry on I will end up with all of the new lenses.
Do you have a “dream project” – something you’d love to do but haven’t had the chance yet?
Yes I do actually – I really want to concentrate on [orchestral] conductors. In my exhibition there’s a whole wall of pictures of conductors, and the more I photograph them, the more you kind of realise that there are such massive differences in terms of style and performance. I’d really really like to do more work on conductors – maybe a book!
Mark was talking to Jon Stapley. To see more of Mark’s work visit his website markallanphotography.co.uk or you can also follow Mark on Instagram at @mark.allan.photos
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