John Downing
Photographer who thrived in trouble spots around the world
JOHN DOWNING, who has died aged 79, was one of Fleet Street’s most respected photographers; he won so many awards for his work that to be fair to his colleagues the judges finally invited him to join them.
In a career spanning nearly five decades at the Daily Express, John was the only photographer in the Grand Hotel in Brighton when an IRA bomb went off in the early hours of October 12 1984. After leading people to safety he photographed the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher calmly leaving the scene; it was an image that became emblematic of the atrocity.
Embedded with the mujahideen ( jihadists) in Afghanistan in 1983 during the Soviet-afghan War, Downing took the first pictures of Russian troops there and managed such a good photograph of the new Hind assault helicopter as it bore down on him – guns blazing – that MI6 requested a copy.
In 1972 he was arrested, beaten, interrogated and imprisoned in Kampala under Idi Amin’s fledgling regime, but managed to retain his cameras and take exclusive photographs of those locked up with him.
John Downing was born on April 17 1940 in West Glamorgan. His mother Glenys was a nurse; his father Kenneth was a colour sergeant and Captain of the Gun in the Royal Marines, serving in the Mediterranean until he was injured by a shell.
After an idyllic childhood in Llanelli, after the war John and his family moved to South London, where his father became a schoolteacher. Rebellious and unacademic, John found his niche when he watched a friend developing photographs in a home darkroom. “That seemed like alchemy,” he recalled, “and I was hooked.”
Having left school at 15, he took on a five-year apprenticeship as a photographic printer with the Daily Mail on the day he turned 16. Desperate to become one of the staff photographers on the Daily Express, he took every night-time freelance job before earning a full-time position in 1970.
Within a year he was sent abroad – first to Sudan, where he spent weeks in the bush with the Anya-nya guerrillas, and then to East Pakistan to cover the fall-out of the 1971 Bangladesh
Liberation War. For the next 30 years Downing covered stories ranging from the Vietnam and Falklands Wars to conflicts, earthquakes and violent events in Africa, Eastern Europe, Central America, Northern Ireland, Mexico City and the Middle East.
He went on many Royal tours, including to Canada and the South Pacific, completed several tours of Bosnia, and was one of the first Western photographers allowed into Chernobyl after the nuclear disaster.
A willing mentor to any young photographer, Downing prided himself on rarely using flash and relying instead on natural light. A book of his photographs, Legacy, was published last year, and he had recently completed his memoir.
In 1992 he was appointed MBE and received an Honorary Fellowship to the Royal Society of Photographers and a lifetime membership of the British Press Photographers’ Association, which he founded.
Diagnosed with lung cancer in 2019, Downing said: “My greatest ambition was to create pictures that would outlast my lifetime and hopefully to create one or two that would be famous long after I stopped taking pictures; I hope that I might have achieved that.”
He considered this good enough for a schoolboy once branded “thoroughly idle; the only thing in which he is thorough”. For his epitaph, however, he preferred the Daily Mail war reporter and diarist Ross Benson’s verdict: “the face of a truck driver, the soul of a poet.”
John Downing married three times, first to Barbara Gregory and, secondly, to Jeanette Claes. Gareth, his son from his first marriage, died of cancer in 2007. In 2006 he married the pianist Anita D’attellis. She survives him with his son Bryn.
John Downing, born April 17 1940, died April 8 2020