Winning matters

I’ve only spontaneously shrieked with joy three times in my adult life. The second time was in 2003. I was standing in the bus queue for the W7 on Crouch End Broadway. After hearing the news from John Easterby, director of the Independent Photographers Group (IPG), the agency that represented me, that I had placed third in the People in the News Stories category at the World Press Photo awards (WPP), I had to sit down. WPP, in my mind was the Oscars of photojournalism. Winning mattered and IPG photographers, then part of Katz Pictures, were actively encouraged to enter competitions. They were habitual winners, the Katz cream. It was the first time I’d entered the WPP awards and the last time I’ve won.

My entry was 12 photographs from the series, Drinking of England (a nod to Martin Parr’s Thinking of England), which then developed to become the book . It was the pre-digital era, all submissions had to be on transparency. If you hadn’t shot on transparency, you made prints then copied them onto slide, a costly process which excluded many across the globe from entering. IPG photographer