Pap Happy

Terry Smith has never taken a digital photograph….

In fact, he only ever uses his mobile device to make telephone calls…now fancy that!

So with a professional career such as his behind him, that makes him something precious within the special photographic environment that our business on The Old High Street in the Creative Quarter of Folkestone, nourishes and encourages.

Film photography as you know by now, has gone beyond just making a comeback, it’s exploding….so to have a professional like Terry to hand is something special to us, and to our customers who have learned of him through our work on his archive.

Thus far, partially due to absence of any online presence, the audience for this superb but not famous photographer has been limited, though it is incredibly enthusiastic. Terry you see, he’s a great speaker, remembers every sitting. He genuinely leaves people awestruck at his work and motivated at the potential possibilities of their own. They leave the shop floating on air!

How did we find him? We didn’t, he found us…it is nice that our reputation spread as far as Hythe where he now lives so he was pointed in our direction in 2017 and appeared rather nervously at the counter asking if we did proper darkroom prints….yes we can, but time makes it not so cheap but he explained that he had an appointment at The National Portrait Gallery and needed to impress and so on.

So we agreed and that week I found myself making prints of some pretty famous people including from memory, a bunch of stars like Jethro Tull, Andrew Lloyd Weber, Annie Lennox, Dirk Bogarde…the latter memorable for being one that took my late Mother’s fancy!

Terry in his time, photographed the legends of the day, some of whom remains legends to this day. He photographed the famaous, the “celebs” from the arts, charts, literature, poilitc, sport, stage and screen

We’d had some previous experience via John Couzins’ work with the NPG so it was satisfying to see five of Terry’s portraits taken in too. Neat eh?

Since then, we have become very good friends, genuinely hit it off very well as he has photograph in his blood too and we’ve had the lucky enough to have dealt with a whole lot of his fantastic work. Work that we intend to share with you over the years right here….on this very website.

Over the last couple of years we’ve sorted exhibitions together, arranged talks to groups and schools and he has been there to meet people almost on demand. That ability we leaned on and together with Mayotte (Magnus) Terry was a great part of helping us to play our part in Open Quarter, a local arts event arranged annually by the CF.

At this point in proceedings, it is a genuine pleasure to be making an introduction about a photographer who is still living (I don’t necessarily include me in that statement!)

Someone who has great experience in publishing and media….someone who can do their own bio for this site, for you….so from here, I hand it over to the the man himself thus it is now my privilege to introduce you, to my great friend Terry Smith….in his own words….

Over to you Terry:

In a career spanning roughly 25 years I freelanced out of London not only for Time and People, but also for other prominent American publications, Business Week, New York Times, USA Today, etc., specialising eventually in portraiture rather than hard-news.

My many exclusive “sitters” in that time have included Margaret Thatcher, Sir Laurence Olivier, Salman Rushdie and Ozzy Osbourne. (Richard note required here: this, is rather modest! It’s a scratch on the tip of a fascinating and exciting iceberg…Terry’s archive reads like a who’s who, many of whom still are!)

Like so many others who managed to carve out a career in photography, my interest in the subject started at a very tender age.

My father, a sales rep, made a little extra money to support us four kids by developing and printing black-and-white films and had a nice little client-base of about 30 or 40 amateur photography enthusiasts.

From the age of eight I would stand at his knee watching and learning, in the darkroom in the basement of our house in Camberwell, Southeast London.

Alhough that was 65 years ago, I can still picture him vividly as he ‘agitated’ rolls of film in small tanks, hung them to dry from clothes pegs and finally, of course, watching him print them, his hands flying over the paper like a demented pianist as he “dodged” one area of the image and “burned in” another under the light of the enlarger, before dropping the pure white paper into the tray of developer.

Seeing the image materialise – at first ghostly, then fully-formed with gleaming whites and solid blacks — it was sheer magic!

Although I didn’t own a camera until I was 14, when Dad bought me a 35mm Ilford “Sportsman,” I had been avidly consuming all the magazines I could lay my hands on – particularly Picture Post and National Geographic – and had learned intuitively from them what made a well-composed picture.

I shall draw a veil over my education – suffice it to say that I won a scholarship to a well-known public school only to be “asked to leave” just before my 15th birthday.

It turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me because I was swiftly accepted for the position of “Editorial Trainee” in the London office of Time-Life Intl. and I started work there in September 1960, at the tender age of just 15 years and 1 month.

The next ten years of my career were spent learning the magazine publishing business.

In that period, I rose from copy boy to junior librarian, then to press telegraphist, and all the while honing my photography skills assisting some of LIFE Magazine’s most feted photographers – among them the great Alfred Eisenstaedt (whom I had the honour to assist) and Mark Kauffman (who won the ‘American Magazine Photographer of the Year Award’ three times.)

In my lunch breaks, my greatest joy was to scour the bookshops in the Charing Cross Road hoovering up every book and magazine on photography I could possibly find.

Particular favourites being anything that showcased the work of great photographers like August Sander, W. Eugene Smith, Diane Arbus, Irving Penn and the hugely talented British photographer Tony Ray Jones who died so tragically at the age of 33.

Away from the office, in my spare time I photographed weddings and play schools, submitted pictures to trade magazines and other publications such as the South London Mercury, I was also fortunate enough to have a portfolio of 100 transparencies of travel photos accepted by an agency called “Colorific!” and it sold well.

All the while I invested in more and more photo equipment, upgrading my trusty Pentax Spotmatic to the “K” series, the “M” series, and eventually the wonderful “LX” series. Later adding the also wonderful Pentax 6X7, I’d also use Hasselblad and the Rolleiflex, the one I still own today, along the way.

My big break in magazine photography came in the early 1970s when the London Picture Editor of Time Magazine – a lovely lady by the name of Brenda Draper – invited me to shoot hard-news stories on an expenses-and-space-rates basis (i.e. my expenses were paid, and I was paid extra for getting a picture published in the magazine.)

Eventually, the time came when Brenda trusted me enough to give me fully-paid assignments and, when I was also offered work for the magazine People Weekly, it was time for me to turn fully professional.

All things said and done…I really must count myself as very fortunate, in that, for the duration of my career major magazines were still using black & white photography…..the beloved medium that addicted me as a boy, back there in that Camberwell cellar. —– Terry Smith

Oh, hello…..looks like it’s back to me now then, thanks Terry!

There’s some things he misses in modesty, how difficult a world the cut and thrust of press photography was then. So let’s ask him a quick question here:

Q: Terry, could you us what a few days working as a freelancing press photographer would involve?

A: “Oh, let’s say that I could be on my way home one day, from photographing a Trades Union meeting in Dagenham perhaps, the pager would buzz meaning there was a message waiting for me at the despatch centre.

This would bring about a hurried search for a non-vandalised public telephone box as that message would be a job, it that would also be sent out to at least two other photographers. (no mobile phones back then ~ Richard)

If you got there first it would mean an assignment, maybe one in the South of France if you were lucky if not you could be off to Downing Street to photograph the Prime Minister or to a recording studio to catch a some band or an artist like Robert Palmer maybe.

Mainly, due to my reputation I’d be called often to the homes of many a well-known celebrity of the day, to photograph them as per my known speciality: one to one.

Among the many many famous souls I’ve photographed are people of the ilk of Sir Laurence Olivier, Helen Mirren, Bob Hoskins, Prof. Stephen Hawking, Jack Higgins and so on and so on….it was a frenetic and very pressurised existence!”

“Papping” as Terry calls it, was all too often the bread and butter for oh so many….Photography that fed the grist mill of celebrity consumption, a trade of fame now fabricated and just taken as read, all so readily and easily manipulated…

The guys here to the left, are in the clear!

Some though, (not Terry I hasten to add) could be camped out for days on end, armed with telescopic lenses and disguised as a blade of grass, just to get that one comprising shot of a royal or big star that was so in demand, newspapers would pay a fee that could, would and did pay off a mortgage or two…

Today such uncaring and invasive behaviours are no longer possible thank God….there are laws in place now. that would see a good few press photographers of that day firmly behind bars. They did it to themselves!

Or maybe not as many a rising star could drop the hint, try to get a photographer in place so as to try to ensure it was their face on the front page, instead of a rival or member of the Royal Family (or both!)

No such thing as bad press?

That type of “papping” wasn’t the only bread and butter…..the pre-arranged uninspiring press calls, the demand for all and every Royal photos was insatiable then. But it would be the same guys taking the same pictures from the same allotted spot time and again….but it paid, it paid the bills and paid rather nicely.

So I know well that Terry will hate me for sharing these photos of a well known lady of the 80s but I shall do so just to illustrate the point that the media machine is insatiable, it always will be but now, people do it for free, often without realising:

When we tell people, the young, middle and old, that Terry filled a wheelie bin full of slides, press shots of Princess Diana and sent it to the tip…..jaws drop and a horrified expression steals away the power of speech briefly.

Diana. she was a product ultimately, sad to say that but it is the truth. She was then the most photographed woman in the world to the extent that she maybe still is.

Few of those shots having much real life value, billions upon billions of them, shot at the motorised Nikon F3 (or Pentax LX in this case) rate of five frames per second.

So he hates that aspect of the past….”I don’t want to be known for that”

“I love black and white, that’s the work I want to be remembered for”

Fair play we say!

I committed this article, this brief bio to the site back in May (2020)….sadly, Terry passed away in Novmeber following a battle with a brain tumor. At time of writing this we are all very upset at this loss of such a lovely man.

It’s always difficult to write about people you know so well so it was with great relief that he chuckled about this one, telling me I’d flattered him too much.

That I can assure you was not the case, he was a genuinely terrific bloke, warm hearted and professional. People he met were left with positive feeling and energised by Terry.

One of the many lasting memories is when he told me about the job of a “smudger” in a Press Office, the person who’d prepare and rush wet contact sheets to the Photo Editor…

“I like that term” he said….in fact “He wasn’t a bad smudger….”

“That would be a nice way to be remembered, I’d like that”

Farewell Terry…

We shall be keeping your work alive here as promised.