Moments that tell their story

With his camera as a witness David O'Neill has seen life, and too often the alternative. He's made a career out of recording war and beauty, the exotic and humdrum.

It's taken him from Rio to the Himalayas, Iraq and Afghanistan to Kosovo, Zanzibar to the Gipton estate in his home town, Leeds. He's photographed plenty of headline-makers, but even more of the unknown.

In the pursuit of news it's easy for journalists to ignore the mass whose stories are untold. O'Neill avoided the trap. He's used his privileged position at the centre of events to make diversions and capture some of the extras on the global stage in the midst of their everyday dramas.

Examples from his travels are to be exhibited in York, and fittingly just a few streets from where his journey behind the lens began in earnest. It's a snapshot of his era, of situations profound and prosaic, and of the workings of the tabloid Press. The 40 images say much about mankind's unchanging drives, excesses and inequalities, but there are lighter moments and glimpses too of the British tendency to put animals before their fellow humans.

It's also a commentary on the social changes since O'Neill left his comprehensive school in Garforth at 16 in the early '70s with few qualifications and even less idea about what he wanted to do. He doubts whether the opportunities he seized, based largely on his street-wise resourcefulness, would be open today to someone from a totally non-academic background.

After lasting six weeks in a printing works, he got a job in the Yorkshire Post's darkroom, encouraged by his father, a keen amateur with a camera and to whom the exhibition is dedicated. O'Neill learned much about the news photographer's craft but developing film and printing the pictures of others became frustrating. He was impatient to be taking his own, so he left the newspaper and got a job on the cruise liner Canberra, "snapping holidaymakers having a good time." Ports of call included Brazil and the Caribbean. They were vivid locations for a photographer but home on leave, and using his father's 35mm Voigtlnder, he sought out edgier sides to life in inner-city Chapeltown and on some of the Leeds estates.

Then the Yorkshire Post, this time in the situations vacant columns, provided him with another stepping-stone. A news agency in York advertised for a photographer. O'Neill took his portfolio to the interview, but the agency's boss was unorthodox, a charismatic taskmaster called John Pick who provided apprenticeships which led to several careers in Fleet Street. "After a brief chat he sent me out with a Nikon camera and told me to come back with a picture he could sell. I was fortunate. There was an advertising stunt involving an athlete and a High Speed Train. My picture was in the nationals next day and I got the job."

He gained an insight into photojournalism, the commercial value of combining words and pictures, and the diversity of the newspaper and magazine market. After four years he went to London to freelance. "It was a golden time to be working in the national press. The papers had plenty of money and they weren't afraid to spend it."

He discovered that when he joined the staff of the Mail on Sunday in 1984. He was sent to look for the Derby-winning racehorse Shergar, kidnapped by the IRA, and joined the hunt for Lord Lucan. He chased British villains on the Costa del Sol and spent three months in the Himalayas searching for the Abominable Snowman with the mountaineer Chris Bonington.

O'Neill's assignments often reflected the newspaper's preoccupation with wildlife in whatever form. In Kenya he photographed lions with the conservationist George Adamson of Born Free fame, killer whales in Russia, rescued leopards from the roof of a nightclub in Spain, and was involved in a hugely-expensive project which led to the closure of dolphinariums in Britain. It involved flying rescued dolphins to an 80-acre lagoon off the Turks and Caicos Islands purchased by the newspaper with the help of donations from readers. The mammals were gradually reintroduced to survival in natural surroundings before being released into the open sea, scenes shot by O'Neill underwater.

There were times when he felt that such campaigns, however well-intentioned, were submerging greater issues and the plight of people in war zones and the poorest countries. In trying to redress the balance, he photographed refugees in the Balkans and victims of the recent Georgia-Russia conflict. He's also been with both sides in Afghanistan, reflected in pictures of the Taliban, volunteer doctors serving with the British Army, and warfare's price when soldiers come home as amputees.

In covering the obvious story he often took a detour. In Bangladesh, while uncovering sweatshop conditions in factories producing garments for the West, he saw peasants who scratch a living from breaking up batteries for their saleable metals. Not news, but new to O'Neill. "You see a scene that stuns you and you have to take the picture."

The next stage of the process is now considerably easier thanks to digital cameras and computers. "When there was film in the camera the photographer's greatest worry in a remote area was how they were going to process it and transmit the images. Today's technology means you can send material from a laptop almost anywhere. What hasn't changed is the need to be in the right place at the right time and to capture a moment that just sometimes in some way can make a difference."

At the age of 53, his personal journey has come almost full circle. He's now freelancing again and has moved back to Yorkshire, in part as a response to the challenges newspapers are facing from new media. He says many of the assignments he covered are no longer financially viable. Saving dolphins or Third World labourers from exploitation costs too much money and manpower.

"It's been a career of immense contrasts. I've seen and photographed many shocking things but also some of the world's wonders. I hope it doesn't sound selfish, but I feel my working life has been blessed, like I've been a bee in a great garden moving from one opportunity to the next."

Living Eye – an exhibition by photojournalist David O'Neill, June 16-July 14, Grays Court, Chapter House Street, York. www.grayscourtyork.com

YP MAG 5/6/10