Overview

John Downing was the pre-eminent press photographer of his generation, winning British Press Photographer of the Year seven times. As a photojournalist 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 of the only source of readable news and information, driven by dynamic characters and with its own 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.

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9781781726587

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John Downing (1940-2020) was an award-winning photojournalist whose career spanned over five decades. As Chief Photographer on 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. Wendy Holden was a respected journalist and war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, covering news stories around the world. She is also the author of more than thirty non-fiction titles featuring inspirational men and women, many of which are international bestsellers and several of which are being adapted for film. They 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 GBP40m for the NHS, and Born Survivors the story of three mothers who hid their pregnancies from the Nazis, now published in 22 countries.

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