Looking for pictures

Before Fleet Street swapped its grand newspaper offices for investment banks and luxury hotels, it was the legendary home to hundreds of photographers and journalists keeping the nation updated with the major news stories of the day. This was the pre-digital age before cameras had monitor screens and instant playback to check focusing and exposure, or to discover if the subject really had blinked at the decisive moment. By today’s standards, photographers shot ‘blind’ and a roll of film was entrusted to the printer working in his dark cavern of wet and dry benches, with trays of developer and fixer and constant running water. Unlike today, the photographer was often the last person to see the print, even though he or she was the first to find the picture. Chris Smith remembers these days fondly. He was in his early twenties when he first came to Fleet Street in 1959, travelling down from Hartlepool to join the Daily Herald. The noisy old road was the dream destination for many young provincial photographers and the young Smith was no exception: “I always wanted to go to Fleet Street, which for newspaper people was the Mecca of journalism,” he recalls. By the time he retired in 2000, his status as one of the most admired and decorated sports photographers in the history of British newspapers was beyond dispute. From the now-defunct Herald he moved to The Observer and then onto The Sunday Times, where he remained for 24 glorious years.

FOR MOST of his working life, sport was Chris Smith’s primary focus: from rugby and football World Cups to golf majors and the Olympics, derbies and Grand Nationals, and the biggest boxing bouts ever staged. Smith only began photographing sport in Hartlepool because the staff photographers on his local newspaper “didn’t like getting wet on a Saturday”, and while he no longer misses the weekend grind, he admits, “I certainly did at the time when I retired.”

During his esteemed career, Smith was named British Sports Photographer of the Year on four occasions and twice-winner of the individual Sports Picture of the Year prize. Now, as he approaches his eightieth birthday, the chance to reflect on 50 years in sports photography and the greatest personalities encountered has been given added impetus by the staging of a major retrospective of his work at the National Heritage Centre for Horseracing and Sporting Art in Newmarket, Suffolk. The title of the exhibition, ‘Gods of Sport’, hints at the reverence and respect he felt for many of his subjects, particularly Muhammad Ali. It should come as no surprise to learn that many of his fellow photographers feel the same way about Smith.

Let’s turn the clock back. You were just 16 when you started at the Hartlepool Mail. What sort of work were you doing back then?

It was actually a small circulation evening paper, which used to sell