Books Books
Category: Art and Photography, Current Affairs, Ebooks, Memoir, Non Fiction
Number of pages: 234
ISBN: 9781781726587
Publication date: June 14, 2022
Price: £19.99
Category: Art and Photography, Current Affairs, Ebooks, Memoir, Non Fiction
Number of pages: 234
ISBN: 9781781726594
Publication date: June 14, 2022
Price: £15.99
Out of stock
Foreword by Jeremy Bowen
John Downing was the pre-eminent press photographer of his generation: he led a life of adventure in wars and hotspots around the world. His memoir, Aperture: Life Through a Fleet Street Lens, offers a unique and first-hand insight into life behind the Fleet Street lens during one of the most interesting periods of world history and a golden age of photojournalism.
As a photojournalist, and seven-time winner of the British Press Photographer of the Year, John Downing recognised a good story, and how to tell it. Aperture is a fascinating and engaging mix of recording the heyday of Fleet Street – multi-million daily sales as the only source of readable news, dynamic characters and its own unique cultures – and Downing’s less glamorous personal experiences on the job. These included long assignments in hotspots around the world, including South Sudan, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Uganda, Bangladesh and Chernobyl, which are vividly described. Widely respected by colleagues, Downing’s work includes some of the iconic images of the period, including the only photograph of Thatcher immediately after the IRA bombing.
Aperture describes the glamour and excitement of journalism at the time: the hard-nosed editors, the rivalries, the ‘work hard play hard culture’, foreign assignments issued at the drop of a hat, the toll on journalists and photographers. Newspapers were hugely important in the daily lives of their readers then, the world was less accessible than now, and newspapers played a vital role in shining light into some of its darker, more inaccessible parts. John Downing played a significant part in this, though not without some personal cost. Completed shortly before his death, with the help of colleague Wendy Holden, Downing filed a story for the final time: his own remarkable life.
John Downing
John Downing (1940-2020) was an award-winning photojournalist whose career spanned over five decades. As Chief Photographer at the Daily Express, he not only witnessed natural and man-made disasters, but also war zones and famine; he covered royal tours, political events, the famous and the infamous, the needy and the poor.
He won numerous awards, including the British Press Photographer of the Year an unprecedented seven times, the United Nations Gold Medal in 1990 and the International Photographer of the Year in 1994 (La Nation, Argentina).
In 1992 he was honoured with an MBE for ‘Services to Journalism’; in 2001 he was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the UK Picture Editors Guild and in 2011 he received an Honorary Fellowship of The Royal Photographic Society.
Wendy Holden
Wendy Holden was a respected journalist and war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, covering news stories around the world. She is the author of more than thirty non-fiction titles featuring remarkable men and women, many of which are international bestsellers and several of which have been adapted for film, television, and radio.
Her titles include the No.1 bestseller Tomorrow Will Be A Good Day, the memoir of Captain Sir Tom Moore, the 100-year-old war veteran who raised £40m for the NHS, and Born Survivors, the story of three mothers who hid their pregnancies from the Nazis, now published in 22 countries. Tomorrow to Be Brave, about the only woman in the French Foreign Legion, is soon to be a movie directed by Angelina Jolie. The film rights have also been sold to her book A Woman of Firsts, the memoir of the ‘Muslim Mother Teresa,’ Edna Adan Ismail. Her book One Hundred Miracles, about a teenage musical prodigy who survived three concentration camps, has been published in ten countries.
Wendy has ghosted numerous other autobiographies of remarkable individuals including Goldie Hawn, Barbara Sinatra, and Patricia Gucci. She is a podcaster and public speaker, teaches creative writing, and works as an editorial consultant. Her first novel, The Sense of Paper, was published by Random House, New York, to critical acclaim. Her second novel, The Cruelty of Beauty, is published in the UK and Europe and will be made into a TV film later this year. She has just finished her third novel and lives on a smallholding in Suffolk, England, with her husband and two dogs.
www.wendyholden.com
“for JD I’d say press photography was often a sport, a competition to get to the nastiest places on the planet and not only survive, not only manage to take pictures, but return to the office with rolls of film for the darkroom. This was at a time before Nikon neg transmitters, satellite phones, and long before digital cameras that file images from the camera to the desk ‘in real time’. It was an incredible audacious skill that JD escaped from many of his assignments not only with his life, but with delicate exposed film from places as murderous as a jail in the seventies Uganda ruled by insane dictator Idi Amin … If you never had the privilege to meet John Downing MBE, winner of British Press Photographer of the Year seven times, hear his stories, you’ll be amazed at this wonderfully evocative read of a world now gone.”
Tim Bishop, British Press Photographic Association
“I’ve just finished reading Aperture and I felt bereft when I reached the last sentence, because I didn’t want the stream of great anecdotes to end. What shines through in this book, is John’s dedication to his craft; his massive heart, not just his love for family and friends, but humanity itself; and also his great courage. His adventures in war zones, especially Sudan, Somalia, Central America and Afghanistan, all undertaken without a helmet or flak jacket, are lessons in fortitude and chutzpah. The bravery with which John faced terminal cancer is awe-inspiring, and I’m glad that my friend had Anita by his side during that impossible battle. I normally read books on Kindle these days, but I’m glad that I have Aperture in hard copy to put on my bookshelf and I can look up and remember that John Downing knew how to live and ultimately, how to die.”
Malcolm Brabant, journalist and friend of John
“As a Fleet Street photographer, Llanelli-born John Downing frequently found himself far from home… dispatched on yet another dangerous foreign assignment. His posthumously published memoir plunges the reader into the cut and thrust of life – and near-death – on the front line… an eye-opening portrait of a perilous profession.”
Ben Woolhead, Buzz Magazine
