Don McPhee: photographer
Guardian Newsroom, Archive and Visitor Centre, London
SUMMER, 1984. A striking Yorkshire miner at Orgreave, wearing an old police helmet, confronts a row of policemen. Yes, you’ve probably seen this photo before. It was very famous at the time, it was used on the cover of GB84, David Peace’s novel about the miners’ strike, and now it fronts the catalogue to this exhibition of the work of Don McPhee, the late Guardian photographer. It’s so simple and iconic that it defies verbal description. Or does it? Look a little closer and you’ll see that the officer’s helmet bears the legend “Kent Constabulary”. Is this a war of the south of the country against the north?
Class warrior or not, McPhee’s work for The Guardian – whose Manchester office employed him from 1971 until his death last year – brims with a sense of historical time and place. The exhibition includes a Brandoesque young child in 1970s Hartlepool, sitting astride his Chopper in leather jacket and gloves. A dramatic photo of Enoch Powell addressing a public meeting shows his crabbed hands reaching out, claw-like, to his audience. One unrepeatable sequence of pictures follows a siege in Oldham in 1973, when police surrounded the house of an armed man. In those heady days before armed police squads and body armour, we are treated to the sight of a bare-headed detective in suit and loafers brandishing an old revolver at the house, a large hanky poking from his breast pocket, as locals watch.
McPhee travelled the world covering everything from Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign in 1988 to the 1974 invasion of Cyprus. An assortment of photos of Greek and Turkish refugee camps highlights the pointlessness of the struggle: without labels, you can’t tell Greek from Turk. The end of apartheid in South Africa also gets a look-in.
But the bulk of this exhibition covers home news. At times, it feels like a (very enjoyable) whistle-stop tour of northern politics over the past 30 years; not just the miners’ strike, but also the Chrysler dispute of 1975 that humbled Harold Wilson’s Government and a meeting of Sheffield Against Rate Capping. In this last photo, a solitary old woman eats food (gruel?) out of a bowl underneath a big banner. Like all McPhee’s political pictures, it’s intensely personal without being sentimental. Look out, too, for the comic picture of the Labour leader Neil Kinnock and Peter Kilfoyle during the latter’s by-election campaign in 1991.
However, McPhee wasn’t just a news photographer, he was an artist. At this exhibition, friends and colleagues, who clearly doted on him, came up to me to explain how he’d wait for the perfect light: “Let’s come back at five, it’ll be just right then”. His diligence paid off: in a stunning image of Slea Head in Ireland, a statue of the crucified Christ is silhouetted against the evening sun, the white disc framed by horizontal clouds and the vertical cross.
This exhibition is a fitting tribute to a man as admired for his work as he was loved for his personality. The evidence for that is in the tributes paid to him by family, neighbours and Guardian colleagues. As a north-westerner born and bred, you’re constantly wondering how his subjectivity filtered the subjects of his pictures, especially the ones close to home.
I’m slightly disappointed that there are no pictures from McPhee’s trip to Shanghai shortly before his death. One can only imagine what the master of light, timing and human faces would have made of that buzzing metropolis. As exhibition organiser Denis Thorpe, who knew McPhee for 23 years, told me: “I wish I was 1 per cent of the photographer he was.”
René Lavanchy
The exhibition continues until June 27
