Shawn Russell
Gifted picture editor at The Telegraph who had a flair for choosing powerful and offbeat images
SHAWN RUSSELL, who has died of leukaemia aged 45, was a bold and decisive picture editor, for the past several years as The Daily Telegraph’s deputy picture editor.
Tall and lolloping, with a disarming smile and an air of being an overgrown schoolboy that endeared him to colleagues, Russell was convinced that well-chosen news photographs could shape the public’s perception of important events – particularly when given the generous canvas of The Telegraph’s full broadsheet page. He brought infectious enthusiasm to the job, but would resist firmly attempts by “non-picture people” to impose what he saw as the wrong selections.
Early on at The Telegraph he established himself as senior picture editor on the ipad edition, showing his flair for displaying quirky pictures (eg, “8ft boa-constrictor found by dog walker in Banbury”) on digital platforms.
He was “always at the heart of any shenanigans”, recalled Bette Lynch, a friend from his Express days. “He loved his job, he loved photography, he loved everything that a newspaper newsroom could offer him.”
Russell was one for nicknames and had a keen sense of the absurd, which revealed itself at editorial picture conferences. At The Telegraph he once proposed to the editor a photograph of an enormous elephant behind a very small tree with the deadpan comment: “Spot the elephant.” Presenting his roundup of the day’s funniest pictures would render him helpless with laughter and his colleagues would wait patiently while he regained his composure.
He got on well with “snappers”. It was his inspired decision – running the desk in his first week as deputy picture editor – to send David Rose to protests in Kiev in February 2014. Russell judged, correctly, that something dramatic was about to happen, and Rose’s picture of a flaming Molotov cocktail arcing across a smoke-darkened sky above rioters was splashed across the width of the front page. Rose won Photojournalist of the Year for the pictures.
On March 22 2017, the day of the Westminster Bridge terrorist attack, Russell played a key role in choosing for the front page Stefan Rousseau’s powerful image of emergency services attending to the attacker who drove his car into pedestrians. It would be Russell’s last day on the desk.
Meanwhile, he kept a beady eye on the competition, and would pore over the front pages of rivals when they were published online at 10 o’clock in the evening.
The editor of The Telegraph, Chris Evans, described Russell as “blessed with tremendous talent … He wasn’t one to play safe … If you were going to put in all those hours, you might as well make a difference, push the boundaries. And that’s what he did … Pushing for the dramatic, the offbeat, the hilarious.”
Shawn Joseph Russell was born on July 11 1971 in Exeter; his father Gordon, a Warrant Officer in the Royal Marines who was awarded the British Empire Medal, was based at Lympstone at the time. When Shawn was a baby his mother, Leslie, died of the illness which would later afflict him.
He boarded at Pocklington School in the East Riding, where he excelled as a chess player, a swimmer and in the cricket team as a bowler. After a year working as a silver service waiter he went to Sheffield University to read Politics and History.
He moved to London after graduating, though he would often make trips to Yorkshire to visit his family, to whom he was devoted. He would talk with intense pride of his father’s military career.
He took a job in the Houses of Parliament on House magazine, and from there went on to Metro followed by The London Paper and then the Daily Express. Arriving eventually at The Telegraph was the fulfilment of a long-cherished ambition.
When acute myeloid leukaemia was diagnosed, Shawn Russell treated it as a minor inconvenience, and he was wryly amused by the hospital’s recommended footwear – washable “Crocs” plastic clogs.
He is survived by his stepmother Elizabeth, who brought him up, his father, younger siblings Alexander and Vanessa, and his partner Sarah.
Shawn Russell, born July 11 1971, died June 11 2017