By Paul Hayward
Non-media types won't know that there is creative rivalry between reporters and photographers. Scribes persist with the belief that words defeat images. But often the finest 'snappers' see permanence that writers can't fully capture on a keyboard. Then, cameras triumph over laptops.
Gerry Cranham, who died on Friday aged 94, helped start a wave of innovative picture taking in an age when 48-megapixel camera phones were non-existent and print was everything. And when Cranham finished taking shots of Muhammad Ali, Pele and the Olympics, he turned his restless eye mostly to horse racing: a compliment to the sport, and proof of its endless visual potential.
At Ascot on Saturday for Champions' Day, Cranham would have ticked off the standard news shot of Frankie Dettori's flying dismount, his day-long grin (Gerry's photographer son Mark was there, in his father's honour). But his gaze would have roamed far past the obvious.
Reporters have to tell you what happened: transmit the basic facts. The art has to be wrapped around that raw material. Photographers too need to send back visual news: the who, the what, the when. Yet their eyes and kit have a power to immortalise drama in a way only the very best prose can.
Cranham's death sent me flicking back through the racing catalogues of the great sports photographers. The Racing Post has been blessed since 1986 to carry the work of the unrelentingly brilliant Edward Whitaker, whose hyper-alert, bustling style is a clue to his talent. The great photographers, you see, can't switch their eyes off.
The finest lensmen and women are in an hourly battle to capture the
essence of things in a way that ends all arguments
Nor can they close their minds to the possibility that a “great shot” is always out there, waiting. If they walk away when you're mid-sentence, it's not because you're boring them. They're thinking “next race,” or “camera position” and often “next year's photography awards.” The best reporters are ambitious and like being given prizes. The finest lensmen and women are in an hourly battle to capture the essence of things in a way that ends all arguments.
When England's footballers won the World Cup in 1966, Cranham trained his camera not on the celebrations on the pitch but Alf Ramsey, the team's unemotional manager, staying seated, then rising reluctantly to his feet to be slapped on the back by others on the bench. Cranham's portrait was a study in English reserve, an encapsulation of something revealing that sat outside the main frame of rejoicing.
Cranham carried those instincts into racing, where the equally gifted Chris Smith took pictures that stopped you in your tracks. One of my favourites from Smith's Turf portfolio is of Lester Piggott and Henry Cecil leaning against an old Mercedes on the Newmarket gallops, while the great jockey holds open the Sporting Life, and Cecil flashes an amused, admiring look at him. If you gave me a week I'm not sure I could write a sentence that would convey so well their characters or their relationship.
In the smartphone age everyone fancies themselves as a memorialiser of the moment. They snap and show anything and everything. But photographers, often cast as a dying breed, look beyond the micro happening all of us can see. The job of their photographs is to tell a story – preferably the story. It was always telling that the bigger the tale, the larger newspapers make the accompanying picture. A personal memory is writing a front-page report of Desert Orchid's uber-dramatic Cheltenham Gold Cup in 1989 while knowing the lead photograph would blow the words away.
Gerry Cranham with Lester Piggott in 1992 | George Selwyn
The best packages are words and pictures as team-mates, working in unison. Lucky is the sportswriter who gets to go on a job with Marc Aspland (Times), Tom Jenkins (Guardian), Whitaker, George Selwyn, Alan Crowhurst or many others too numerous to mention. In racing, Cranham and Smith were unintentional ambassadors for racing by showing the sport to be a multi-layered one of equine beauty, human toil, natural amphitheatres and intense struggle between horses and jockeys. When their cameras settled on the cast, with two legs or four, you peered into their lives as well as their wins and losses.
As Whitaker said of Cranham in the Racing Post: “He looked at photography in a different way; he looked around the periphery to convey the message of a sporting event when nobody else would.”
Whitaker's approach is similar. He can turn up at Brighton for a humdrum Tuesday meeting and have your eyes zinging with the grandeur of the Sussex Downs.
A lamentable feature of some modern media outlets is that true photography has been demoted, except where it has the power to shock. 'Images' are now the stock currency: visual bait you click through. Yet the great photographers are still out there, lugging their heavy gear, queuing endlessly for accreditation, scurrying for the best camera set-up spots and often getting soaked and being treated as pests.
They do it because they are animated by an unquenchable urge to stop time in its tracks, to lay down permanent records (and to get paid, naturally). Racing photography has many such “artists of the light,” as reporters sometimes call them, teasingly. Cranham's death brought a reminder that the sport should never cease to be grateful.
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