Eamonn McCabe, who has died suddenly aged 74, was a photographer, photo editor, educator and broadcaster, and served as the Guardian’s picture editor for 13 years. And when he wasn’t shooting, editing or talking about images, he was collecting awards for doing so. His work won him picture editor of the year an unprecedented six times and sports photographer of the year four times, creating groundbreaking photographs for the Observer. From his early pictures, such as one of a table tennis player with a very high throw, or an image of Björn Borg’s gimlet eyes on a tennis ball, it was recognised that Eamonn, like Borg, had his own way of perceiving the world. He was bringing something different to sports photography and his trophy cupboard started to fill.
In 1985 he won news photographer of the year for his photographs of the Heysel stadium disaster in Brussels. He was there to cover a football match, but sport was forgotten when the tragic events unfolded. He said that witnessing this horror had a lasting effect on him and perhaps hastened his departure from sports photography. “I went as a sports photographer, thrilled to be covering Juventus against Liverpool, and ended up a news photographer, as the whole thing turned into a terrifying disaster in which 39 supporters were killed … I never processed the films from the game itself. They didn’t seem to be very important.”
Editing pictures became the route out of weekly witnessing English football at its worst, and in 1988 Eamonn was recruited as picture editor of the Guardian by its then editor, Peter Preston, to help the paper see off the new Independent with its well-printed photography. Eamonn’s unique way of seeing and framing the world worked as well behind a desk as behind his cameras. He understood how a news or feature photograph is used and cropped is often as important as its content.
Eamonn was born in Highgate, north London. His father, James McCabe, was a taxi driver and his mother, Celia (nee Henchy), a hotel receptionist. They went on to open a hotel in Manor House opposite Finsbury Park. The young Eamonn grew up among the same postwar streets as another photography great, Don McCullin. At Challoner school in Finchley, it seems he spent most of the time playing football and boxing – he left school with just a couple of O-levels. He started work in a solicitor’s office, then in the accounts department of a brewery, but ledgers and spreadsheets were not for him and he got a job as a junior in an advertising agency. A previous incumbent of his lowly position had been David Bowie.
After a couple of years he got the travel bug, left the ad agency and headed to the capital of flower power in the 60s, San Francisco. He enrolled for a film-making course, but discovered a love for stills photography rather than movies. Eventually he had to leave – with the visa he held, he was in danger of being sent to Vietnam. But first he had a Rolling Stones gig to go to: “Mick Jagger laid on a free Stones concert on 6 December 1969 at the Altamont Speedway, northern California. Three hundred thousand people turned up. I had my cameras and pushed my way upfront to the tiny stage that had been hastily produced. By most accounts, the Hells Angels were hired as security for $500 worth of beer. If Woodstock was the dream, Altamont was the nightmare – the stage was much too low and the Angels didn’t like the sight of nudity and weighed into the crowd with snooker cues. A big guy next to me got the worst of it and I just ran. You don’t argue with the Angels high on beer.”
Returning to the UK, he worked in the photo unit of Imperial College, followed by a job with the London Photo Agency (LPA). He worked in the darkrooms and took pictures at rock concerts. This was a far more exciting world for a 23-year-old. Eamonn said: “The Rolling Stones, the Who, the Beach Boys – they were our heroes. Theirs was the music we listened to anyway ... there was a rawness about them that made good pictures.”
However, in the LPA building, there was another picture agency, Sporting Pictures, where Eamonn got some shifts shooting football matches. He had always been keen on sport, specifically football, and he was a lifelong Tottenham Hotspur fan. Like many sports photographers, if he hadn’t been sent to an event to take pictures, he might well have been there as a fan.
In 1974 Eamonn decided to set up his own picture agency in north London – working for the local papers in the area, but crucially shooting all the home matches of the north London rivals Spurs and Arsenal. He distributed pictures to the national papers. Within a couple of years he landed a contract with the Observer. The paper allowed and encouraged him to develop a style – what became known as “an Eamonn McCabe picture” – a different angle, perhaps away from the peak of the action; a detail; something graphic; a strong use of black and white; a touch of humour. The Guardian’s sports photographer Tom Jenkins said: “Formal shape and a whimsical sense of humour played a large part in McCabe’s sports work, like his picture of the bald Bristol City goalkeeper John Shaw looking like he was about to boot his own head into the centre-circle. Eamonn was always on the lookout for something different.”
According to Jenkins, a picture of the boxer Sylvester Mittee wrapping his hands with bandages before a training session is a prime example of this: “A close-up moment that probably no other photographer at the time would have bothered with.” Eamonn himself explained the choice of lens: “I grabbed a 180mm lens, quite long for indoor work, but it paid off. The effect was to throw everything out of focus except the bandaging and texture of his fingers.”
He documented just about every sport and covered three Olympic Games. And he photographed the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer – as a sports photographer he was able to capture the kiss on the palace balcony with his long cricket lens.
The peerless sports journalist Hugh McIlvanney wrote of being Eamonn’s colleague at the Observer in a foreword to his first book, Sports Photographer (1982): “Working with Eamonn McCabe can be hazardous to a reporter’s ego. His photographs often convey the essence of an event or a performer with such dramatic succinctness that the writer assigned to the same job is left with the feeling of having turned in a 1,500-word caption.”
As well as shooting sport, Eamonn also played for an amateur team, the Nine Elms Dynamos: “One morning, when we were getting a real spanking,” he wrote, “a long-haired centre forward scored yet another goal and ran back past me as I was lying face down in the mud: ‘You didn’t get a picture of that one, did you?’”
After Heysel, Eamonn was offered his first picture-editing job, on a new magazine, Sportsweek. It seemed a perfect journal for the move from shooting to editing photography. Unfortunately, the proprietor was Robert Maxwell. It was a good product with great photography, edited by Eamonn, but it lost money and Maxwell soon tired of the losses. The Guardian needed a new picture editor. Perhaps an award-winning sports photographer with very little editing experience might not have been everyone’s choice, but Preston knew it could work.
Paul Johnson, until recently deputy editor of the Guardian, said that Eamonn “transformed the look and feel of the newspaper almost overnight. Some senior colleagues felt the photographs were just too big and were squeezing out words, until gently reminded, with a smile, that no reader had ever complained about the lack of words in the Guardian (the wrong words, yes, all the time, but not lack of them).”
Eamonn recruited new photographers and ensured that photography was not an afterthought. He got his picture choice printed on 20in x 16in paper by the Guardian darkroom and argued hard for his selection in news meetings. Johnson said: “Eamonn had a compelling visual literacy but also warmth and charisma. People loved working for him, people loved working with him.”
Eamonn was in his element as the Guardian covered the big news events that seemed to come with increasing frequency at the time – the downing of the Pan Am plane over Lockerbie, the Clapham rail crash, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
In 2001 Eamonn decided to “go back on the road”. He had a need to create his own images. He stayed on at the Guardian, but this time shooting something a bit quieter: portraits. He photographed many notable people, from Tony Blair to Iris Murdoch, Lou Reed to Desmond Tutu. The Guardian feature writer Simon Hattenstone said: “Eamonn was astonishingly quick, he never panicked, and he was fantastically unobtrusive. Often the photo was done before the subjects had time to smile or stiffen up.” He favoured a direct approach with his portraits. He liked his subjects to confront his camera and, by extension, the viewer.
Many of these photographs are in the National Portrait Gallery collection. He also photographed artists and their studios for the Guardian and the Royal Academy magazine, including Frank Auerbach, Grayson Perry, Bridget Riley, Howard Hodgkin and Maggi Hambling.
Eamonn was keen to pass on his knowledge and inspire others. A steady stream of hopefuls brought portfolios to his desk, where he dispensed advice and encouragement. His educational work extended to TV programmes such as Britain in Focus (2017) for the BBC. He was often chosen by the broadcast media as a photo pundit – he was recently interviewed about imagery of Queen Elizabeth – and his relaxed manner and thorough knowledge made him a natural on TV or radio. He published six books – the last one, on aerial photography, demonstrates the breadth of his photographic knowledge.
As well as honorary professorships at Thames Valley (Preston responded to the appointment by nicknaming him “Prof”) and Staffordshire universities, Eamonn was visiting senior fellow in photography at the University of Suffolk and held an honorary doctorate from the University of East Anglia.
He moved to Suffolk a few years ago and immediately got involved with photography in the county. He taught at the university in Ipswich and when PhotoEast – the Ipswich-based photo festival – was founded, Eamonn was asked if he would become the patron. He agreed without question.
Eamonn was always a dapper dresser and, once he had left his sports photographer’s waterproofs behind, his tweed coat and jaunty hats looked the part in the small town of Saxmundham where he lived. Although he was a Londoner who enjoyed the pubs, jazz clubs and art galleries of the city, life in the country gave him land- and seascapes to photograph and a vegetable garden to tend. He swapped soccer for golf – he played a round two days before he died.
On hearing the news of his death, Eamonn’s erstwhile neighbour McCullin said: “McCabe was like all great photographers – he never stopped working. Like most of us, his life was photography.” The answer to which is one of Eamonn’s favourite sayings, “It’s better than working, Rog”.
In July 1997 Eamonn asked Rebecca Smithers, a Guardian journalist, to marry him while they were on a press trip to New York – they were married at City Hall a couple of days later. He is survived by Rebecca and their daughter, Mabel; by Ben, his son from a previous marriage, to Ruth Calvert, that ended in divorce; and by Marian, his sister.
Roger Tooth
Alan Rusbridger writes: The email from Eamonn McCabe popped into my inbox just after breakfast one day in the spring of 2009. “What is it with X [here was the name of an internationally acclaimed fashion photographer whose work had been featured in that day’s Guardian]? I don’t get it. That photograph (?) of Y [here was the name of the subject in the offending portrait] has to be one of the worst we have ever printed ... I spent years trying to get that sort of crap out of the pages. What next, handshakes and big cheques?”
I revisited the image this week. It was, indeed, sensationally bad – poorly lit, awkward shadows, overexposed, lazily composed, clumsily cropped and barely in focus.
I don’t think Eamonn was bitter about the prices his fellow lensman could command (upwards of £40k for a plate). More likely, he felt puzzled – and, on behalf of press photographers the world over, a bit insulted. As a former picture editor, he knew that a dozen or more staff or freelance photographers – none of them remotely household names – would have come up with a better photograph given five minutes and a bare wall.
Eamonn was a press photographer to his fingertips. As a sports photographer on the Observer, he had lightning reactions and an instinctive eye for composition. Even if you didn’t know the name, you’d recognise many of the iconic images from his years on the touchline.
The former Times writer, Simon Barnes, wrote of his images: “People in sports journalism talk about an ‘Eamonn McCabe shot’ even when McCabe did not take the picture. They are talking about a style, a vision, a way of looking at sport.”
It was an inspired move when my predecessor as editor of the Guardian, Peter Preston, hired Eamonn to be picture editor in 1988 – the time of a crucial redesign. The paper had always employed distinguished staff photographers, but they were often let down by the quality of printing and by lacklustre design. Eamonn did, indeed, ban the “crap” – especially the cliched picture that told you nothing. He favoured the bold, the unexpected – images that not only caught your eye but lingered in the mind. He was encouraging to young photographers; always approachable … and always up for a pint or two at the end of his shift.
He was a late convert to the power of colour – once railing against the distracting glare of hi-vis jackets in an image of rescue workers at a train crash. But, in time, he came to accept the inevitable.
And then, remarkably, he had a third career (via a flirtation with landscape) as a portrait photographer, usually illustrating the culture pages’ profile of distinguished writers, artists and musicians. Unlike some internationally acclaimed photographers he could mention, he might only be given a few minutes and inadequate light in which to bag his shot. Nine times out of 10 he memorably and sensitively captured his subject.
It’s difficult to think of a comparable figure in photography – one who successfully crossed genres and who also had a spell generously editing the work of his peers. He was also one of the warmest and most collaborative figures in Fleet Street.
“Journalists are far too bashful to refer to any of their newspaper work as ‘art’,” wrote Barnes in an introduction to Eamonn’s work in 1987. Hence, perhaps, Eamonn’s snort of derision for the picture in the Guardian back in 2009. But Eamonn was truly a kind of artist, as well as an unpretentious pressman. He was a very rare thing.
• Eamonn McCabe, photographer, born 28 July 1948; died 2 October 2022
• This article was amended on 6 October 2022 to remove an erroneous date on the picture caption of Harold Pinter.
