Sally Soames
Fleet Street photographer celebrated for portraits which captured the inner spirit of her subjects
SALLY SOAMES, who has died aged 82, was a Fleet Street photographer who covered everything from the Yom Kippur war to National Front demonstrations, but her real strength was portraiture; she had the gift of establishing a personal connection with her subjects, and her images – always shot in black and white and mostly in natural light – seemed to capture the inner spirit of her sitters, revealing the vulnerable individual behind the public face.
As a photographer with the Observer, then on the Sunday Times, Sally Soames worked with kings, queens, heads of government, writers, artists and Hollywood stars. She would research her subjects in depth and spend a long time talking to them before taking her shots, coaxing even the most reluctant sitter to give her something of themselves.
Norman Mailer, who famously hated to be photographed, wrote in a preface to a collection of her portraits of writers: “The relation between the eye that commands the lens and the subject is essentially an oppressive and one-sided relation … It is Sally Soames’s gift to take that arid and mutually exploitative encounter, and turn it into the rarest of media transactions – an agreeable 10 minutes between two strangers who thereby are left with a simple reminder that fellowship is also a communion natural to us.”
She established a fruitful working relationship with Britain’s first woman prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, whom she first photographed in Finchley before she became leader of the Conservative Party, finding her “very friendly and amenable”.
She made frequent visits to Downing Street, the final occasion being the night before Mrs Thatcher’s departure from office. The atmosphere in No 10, she recalled, was “terrible” and eventually Sally Soames burst into tears.
“‘I’ve known you for 11 years and I’m very upset,’” she told the prime minister: “She said ‘It’s all right, dear.’ She felt sorry for me, there was I getting tearful and she didn’t get upset. We had a real affinity, especially at the end. There was I behaving like a baby, and she was cheering me up.” She noted, however, that the Iron Lady always called her “dear”, never by her name.
Sally Soames disliked only one of her subjects, the Labour peeress Baroness Jay, whom the Sunday Times arranged for her to photograph in 1998. “I [was] so angry about the rude, offhand way she treated me, making me feel like a worm,” she recalled, “that I wrote saying so and posted it through her letterbox. The worst thing is she looked good in my pictures.”
She was born Sally Winkleman in north London on January 21 1937. Her father, Leonard, combined being a businessman and art connoisseur with membership of the Communist Party.
Educated at King Alfred School, Golders Green, and St Martin’s College of Art, she took up photography in the late 1950s when she borrowed her husband Leonard Soames’s camera and found she had a natural flair. She went on to join a camera club, and in 1961 an image of a young man celebrating the New Year in Trafalgar Square won her five guineas in an
Evening Standard photographic competition, launching her career. Her first regular work was for The
Observer from 1963, though she recalled messing up her first assignment: “They sent me off with a famous golf writer to a tournament and I’d never seen golf played in my life.” Not knowing that she should wait until the ball was played, she took her picture – the sound infuriating the golfer and embarrassing her colleagues: “A fantastic image – but everyone was going to kill me.”
In 1968 Sally Soames joined the staff of The Sunday Times, remaining with the paper until worsening health brought her career to an end in 2000.
Over the years she covered major news events, including the miners’ strikes of the early 1980s when she took a famous photograph of Arthur Scargill covered in coal dust, and the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
The former Sunday Times editor Harold Evans recalled how the reporter Nicholas Tomalin, in a last dispatch before he was killed by a Syrian missile, wrote of her being “the first Englishwoman photographer to stand bolt upright throughout [an air attack] snapping pictures as if she were covering a golf tournament”.
In her early days Sally Soames’s subjects were sometimes uncomfortable with a woman photographer. When she turned up to photograph the boxer Cassius Clay in 1966, before he became Muhammad Ali, she was banned while her male colleagues were allowed to be present while he was rubbed down.
Sally Soames regretted the way in which the lives of the famous people were increasingly dictated by their PR advisers, giving her little time to get to know them. In one of her later jobs she was given just three and a half minutes to photograph Sean Connery at Claridge’s, yet she managed to spend two of those minutes in conversation with the actor.
By contrast in 1967 she had been given half a day by Orson Welles, even getting away with a question about his film, Citizen Kane, which was reputed to be “off-limits”.
One of her last jobs before her retirement was to photograph the prime minister Tony Blair for the 2001 general election.
In 2004, after the death of her beloved cat, Lily, she became one of the first people to use The Daily Telegraph’s short-lived Pet Obituaries service. “I don’t want to come across as a loony,” she explained, “but I live alone. My son is based abroad and I cannot fly, as I am partially disabled, so Lily was like a child to me.”
Many of Sally Soames’s portraits are held in major galleries and collections around the world – 17 in the National Portrait Gallery alone – though she gifted the bulk of her work to the Guardian Media Group’s Scott Trust Foundation.
Her marriage to Leonard Soames was dissolved in 1966. She is survived by their son.
Sally Soames, born January 21 1937, died October 5 2019