Window on the world (From The Northern Echo)

Window on the world

2:21pm Friday 11th June 2010 in

• Skip social links
• Print
• Email
• Comments(0)

Ruth Campbell meets a photographer who has brought us some of journalism’s most iconic images.

DAVID O’NEILL has been both blessed and cursed with the ability to capture exceptional images on film. Even a quiet stroll through the back lanes of York, where the internationallyrenowned photojournalist lives, leaves him with aching eyes.

“I can’t walk down a street without constantly searching out the next picture.

I will be looking at every single person until my eyes hurt,” he says.

It his through his eyes that readers of national newspapers in Britain have been given glimpses of unfolding dramas around the world, from war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan to the sieges of Sarajevo and Kosovo.

But, in the shadow of such brutal conflicts, he has also taken time out to capture the common humanity of everyday life. While the bombings and shootings provide a backdrop, there are women travelling on a bus with their dry cleaning, children playing in the streets and parents tenderly caressing their young.

O’Neill is showing these images, with more than 40 other black and white pictures taken on his travels around the world, in an exhibition opening later this month in York, the city where he started his journalistic career more than 25 years ago.

Although he clearly has a nose for a good news story – he has recently been covering the aftermath of the shootings in Cumbria, the hunt for missing York chef Claudia Lawrence and the trial of “Crossbow Cannibal”

murder suspect Stephen Griffiths – his eye is repeatedly drawn to what is happening just around the corner, out of central shot.

And so, in Bangladesh, while photographing sweatshop conditions in factories producing clothes for the West, he noticed peasants scratching a living from breaking up batteries for their saleable metals: “You see a scene that stuns you. You have to take the picture,” he says.

The mood of the exhibition isn’t all sombre. There are joyful scenes too, of a young girl washing her little brother in the river in Bangladesh and laughing children playing on a beach in Zanzibar.

“These are moments of pure happiness, they remind me of my childhood,”

says O’Neill, who has three sisters and grew up on a smallholding outside Leeds. His exhibition is dedicated to his father, Stanley, a retired print worker, now 87.

An amateur photographer himself, it was Stanley who encouraged his son, who left school at 16 with few qualifications, to go for a darkroom job on the Yorkshire Post: “I took to it like a duck to water,” he says.

Young David used to wander the streets of Leeds with his camera looking for inspiration: “I would photograph old ladies in their kitchens and capture kids playing in back streets. Visually, it was stunning.”

He went on to work for a York news agency and then the nationals.

Over the years, Stanley saw his son set off on a range of colourful assignments, from joining climber Chris Bonnington in the Himalayas on a hunt for the Yeti to tracking down British villains on the Costa del Sol. O’Neill has also been involved in newspaper animal welfare campaigns, including freeing leopards from the roof of a Spanish nightclub and rescuing dolphins from British dolphinariums to be released back to the open sea.

In 1984, he took what he believes to be one of the best photographs, and the only one he has ever hung on his wall. It is a picture of wildlife conservationist George Adamson, of Born Free fame, in the Kenyan bush, rifle in hand as he watched over his lions. He was killed five years later, aged 83. “He is my hero, he changed my life. He was strong and kind and true to himself, a selfless man with a huge sense of right and wrong. This image captures his amazing spirit.”

Adams’ example sustains him even now, says O’Neill, who admits he has made personal sacrifices in order to pursue his career.

He has been shot at, run over and beaten up in the course of his work.

“The worst time was in 2000, when I came back from two months in Afghanistan,” he says: “I couldn’t work. I couldn’t do anything. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was suffering from post traumatic stress.

“The despair, the poverty, the feeling life is so cheap, it got to me I suppose,”

he says. Thankfully, his mood eventually lifted.

He is constantly humbled by the human spirit’s strength and resilience and was especially inspired by the dignity of Albanian refugees escaping the atrocities of ethnic cleansing, in which tens of thousands died, during the Croatian conflict.

“The Serbian soldiers were monsters, committing butchery. But I am sure they loved their children and their pets. You see that kind of humanity, even in these kind of people.

“Brutality and humanity go hand in hand. You see the strength people have when they are faced with adversity, their kindness. It is very humbling. That experience helps me in my personal life,” he says.

O’Neill, 53, still enjoys the thrill of journalism: “I love the detective work of getting a story, finding people and putting things together, that’s what I learnt in my early days in York.” But, increasingly frustrated by the celebrity- obsessed nature of many national newspapers, he wants to spend time on personal projects: “The business has changed. I am in a position where I can be self-indulgent.”

He plans to travel down the Ganges in a small boat. “I can afford to meander and enjoy and just see what pictures there are to take.”

Having lived in London for 25 years, he has returned to live just outside York, he says, because this is where he started out in his career and the city has been good to him.

“I’m very fortunate, like a bee in a huge garden taking pollen at the optimum time, moving from one great opportunity to the next.” And then something occurs to him: “I hadn’t really thought about it before, but the cottage I live in is called Bumblebee Cottage.”

After half a lifetime of travelling, it looks as if David O’Neill has found the perfect place to put down roots.

■ Living Eye – an exhibition by photojournalist David O’Neill, June 16 to July 14, Grays Court, Chapter House Street, York.

grayscourtyork.com and davidoneill.info