Far from the front pages

If your job requires you to leap into action when a big story breaks on the other side of the globe, Appleton-le-Moors is not the obvious place for a base. The village is not a news magnet, unless you happen to be a sheep.

Three of them seemed hell-bent on making headlines one morning a few days ago. They stood line abreast in the middle of the road just beside the village sign, gazing mildly into the middle distance as a small white van raced towards them.

The road was straight and empty. Perhaps the driver thought sheep played chicken. With 20 yards to go, he hit the brakes. The wheels locked on the wet road and the skid took the vehicle, rocking wildly, in a short arc off the unfenced road and back again. The van came to a halt at the rear of the sheep, none of which blinked.

Within a minute came a similar event at a slower speed, this time with a motorist coming from the opposite direction out of the village. Word must then have got out on the grapevine. An hour later, thrill-seeking sheep were everywhere up and down the village's wide main street.

"We wanted a lifestyle shift and we certainly got it," said Gary Calton, who until he came to live here was urban man through-and-through. A steel-worker's son from the east end of Sheffield, he had spent all his working life living in cities. Now the sheep graze at the entrance to his stone-built house which has been part of this streetscape for ever, well, since 1787 anyway.

For your nearest shop, you have to get off the moor and drive down to Kirkbymoorside. But any drawbacks are easily outweighed by what this location offers a man with a young family.

"I like running," says 43 year-old Gary. "I get to the door and I'm on the moors. The kids can take the dog for a walk on their own. It's a free and easy lifestyle."

His photojournalist job takes him away for extended periods and does not link him into a routine network of rural occupations. So he was keen to raise his profile among the villagers by agreeing to have his photographs on show at an exhibition today and tomorrow at the village hall to raise money for its maintenance.

"I don't think most of them here know what I do. Now they can see why I disappear for 10 days or so."

He trained as a teacher and at 23 set out for London for a post-graduate photojournalism course. "I was intending to stay two or three years and ended up living there for 16."

His big break came during a supply teaching spell in Brixton. He had also been working at a project documenting in pictures the lives of young offenders and joyriders in Deptford in south east London and at Benwell in Newcastle. These pictures caught the eye of a photographer from the Observer which led, at the beginning of 1992, to an invitation to meet the newspaper's picture editor.

"He saw something in me and took a bit chance with me. I was 25. It was a case of the right person at the right time."

He was asked to go in one day a week to work at the newspaper and for the time being kept on with the teaching.

"I had no family link with the arts or photographic background.

It was a question of absorbing everything you could about making a visual statement.

"Those were scary times. Here I was on my very first newspaper – which just happened to be the world's oldest – and rubbing shoulders with world-renowned photojournalists." One of them was the legendary Jane Bown, now 84 and still working.

"I was having to pinch myself that I was part of this scene. I was incredibly lucky. I was learning as I went along. Every day I thought I would be found out and kicked out of the door.

"But if you can produce the goods, people will put an arm round your shoulder and guide you along. A newspaper like the Observer gives

you a ticket to access the corridors of power, the rich and the famous and extreme events."

He met his wife, also from Sheffield, at 19. She did a degree in Fine Art at Hull University and they met again in London. They now have two children, aged 10 and seven.

Gary's first front page picture was of Prime Minster John Major and President Clinton walking through a cemetery for American servicemen. It was shot on colour transparency which he had to rush back to London for processing. That's why in those days photographers needed to live in the place where their newspaper was based. And that's why today they can live on the distant North York Moors. In journalism, digital technology has made us free (well, up to a point Lord Copper). You can transmit electronically whatever you have from wherever you are.

Gary's first foreign news assignment was covering the exodus of the Hutu people from Rwanda. Since then his work has taken him all over the world. It's a job where you need to be able to think on your feet. "The Observer is always after something different. I do the whole lot – documentary, news and paparazzi. The press pack is a bit of a beast in itself. But you can't deny being part of a news event is exciting, plus there's the pressure. You may have just one chance to get the shot."

A less urgent method of working is apparent in a mixed-media project Gary calls Citizens of Our Time. It's like a series of case studies accumulated steadily over several years. He points his camera at people who have a bee in their bonnet about some cause or other and then sends them a large black and white print of themselves which has a large space underneath. He encloses a pen and asks them to write about why they are taking this action. Some write a detailed account, some just add a slogan. Others compose a poem.

He steers away from the ardent professional campaigner in the Citizen Smith mould. In London, he drove past a chap who was campaigning outside a block of flats. Gary parked his car and went back to discover

the man was seeking reinstatement as the flats' gardener – even though the role was unofficial and unpaid. He duly became one for the Citizens archive.

"It's creating a document," says Gary. "It's a snapshot to show what life was like in our time and what was concerning people enough to make them take to the streets."

The photo with the subject's own words makes a compelling and poignant match. These driven individuals stare out of their pictures, dogged and undaunted, investing every fibre of themselves in their cause. They press on with unshakeable belief, sometimes for years, regardless of the fact that the world mostly passes by on the other side. It seems somehow very British.

Appleton le Moors village hall, exhibition of photographs, ceramics

and art, including the work of James Brooke, Maggy Tebb and Janey Hayton, today 10am to noon 2 with morning coffee. Tomorrow 3pm to 5pm, 2 with tea and cake.

YP MAG 25/9/10