Golden era
This feature has been more than 18 months in the making. I first met Tom back in 2018, up at HipFest in Hull. It was the photographer himself who suggested holding back my writeup until this year – his career 50th anniversary – to give it a ‘hook’. Still, what would you expect from someone who has spent five decades honing his eye for a story?
In 1970, Tom walked into the offices of the Berwick Advertiser having never picked up a camera before. In the intervening years, his career has given him a front-row seat to some of the biggest and most dangerous moments in history over the past half a century. He has photographed across several continents, witnessing the war in Lebanon, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the election of President Nelson Mandela, the bloody siege of Sarajevo and the wars against Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
You’ll almost certainly be familiar with at least some of the work found across these pages. It has been published in a huge variety of illustrious publications, including The Sunday Times Magazine, while his powerful work on the HIV/AIDs pandemic across sub-Saharan Africa won him a Pictures of the Year World Understanding Award in 2003. In the same year, he was also awarded the Larry Burrows Award for Exceptional War Photography.
Other plaudits and accolades are almost too numerous to count, while it’s clear that although he’s taking things a touch easier now, he has no plans to stop any time soon. Understandably,
