Storytelling That Changes Lives - Sean Gallagher on Photojournalism

In Episode 18, Joe interviews Sean Gallagher, an independent photographer and filmmaker based in China. A fellow of the Royal Geographic Society with a passion for environmental issues, Sean is a multi-award-winning photojournalist whose work has appeared in National Geographic and on CNN. 

After studying zoology, Sean stumbled upon photography by discovering an old family camera. His growing passion led him to teach himself how to develop his own prints and inspired him to seek out an internship at Magnum Photos. His time there fuelled his interest in photojournalism and gave him the opportunity to learn from some of the best in the field.

Sean tells us how he came to live in China, driven by a fascination sparked by his father's stories of the country. He shares the challenges and rewards of building a career telling stories through images. Discover how he builds key relationships with both local communities and potential buyers. This isn't just a job for Sean - we get a real sense of passion for the stories he tells and a deep belief in the difference photojournalism can make to international issues.

Joe and Sean delve into the ethics of photojournalism, the role of awards, and the impact of storytelling through visuals. Sean offers insights into the technical and emotional aspects of his work, emphasizing the importance of being in the moment and the power of photography to cast light on global issues such as the climate crisis.

Whether you're an aspiring photojournalist or simply interested in what goes into creating compelling storytelling images, Sean's story is educational and inspiring.

 

Images © Sean Gallagher (Used here with permission)

 

To see more of Sean's work, please visit his website: gallagher-photo.com. You can also follow him on Instagram. For photography tips check out his educational YouTube channel, where you can also find his podcast "The Camera Doesn't Matter," featuring interviews with other photojournalists.

 

Sponsored by The Society of Photographers

 

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to the Focused Professional Podcast, sponsored by the Society of Photographers.
I'm your host, Joe Lenton, and this is Episode 18.
Music.

(00:33):
Welcome to the focused professional podcast today we've
got a guest from china this is sean gallagher he
is an independent photographer and filmmaker he has spoken at universities around
the world won many awards for his images and films he's a keen cyclist he cares
deeply about environmental issues he's a fellow of the royal geographic society

(00:54):
and his work has featured among many other places in National Geographic and CNN.
Welcome, Sean. Hi, Joe. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.
Thank you very much for coming on the podcast to talk to us today.
I'm really excited to speak to you and hopefully share some things that will
be of interest to your audience as well.

(01:14):
Fantastic. Thank you. So I read that you started out as a scientist.
Does that mean that photography came later or is that something that's always
been a passion alongside your scientific work? early Ron.
Well, I trained as a scientist. I studied zoology at university in the UK.
I graduated in 2002. And at that point, I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my career.

(01:41):
I knew that I was interested in the sciences. I knew that I was interested in environmental issues.
But at that point, photography hadn't really come into my life very seriously.
It was only actually during the third year of university that on one return
trip back home during holidays, I discovered my mother's old little Canon camera

(02:04):
when we were cleaning out some boxes.
And I asked her if I could borrow it and use it.
And I took it back with me to university and started to play around with it,
started to shoot photos in my spare time.
And it was really, that was the very beginning of my photography career.
But at that point, it was really very much just experimenting with photography.
But quite quickly, I started to really fall in love with photography and started

(02:28):
to really see the world through the camera.
And it kind of awakened something within me.
But at that point, having just graduated from university, I didn't really know
what I wanted to do with my life or my career.
But at that point, I had a degree in zoology and I had this very early interested in photography.

(02:55):
And so at that point, that was the beginning for me, but I didn't know what
the future held for me at that point.
So did you have any photographers that you looked up to that you drew on as
an influence at all, or did you just completely find your own way? Yeah.
Well, at that point, I didn't really know too much about photography.

(03:17):
It was very typical in the sense that all I really knew about photography at
that point was National Geographic.
We had, like everybody, a whole stack of National Geographics at home.
My mother liked Steve McCurry, so she had some of his books in bookshelves at home.
So those were my very first early exposures to photography, That really classic

(03:40):
travel photojournalism, National Geographic style of photography.
And so from those early exposures, I actually got quite interested in photojournalism
after I graduated university.
And so that was my first idea about what photography might be,
that classic travel National Geographic photojournalism.

(04:03):
So I started to look into how I could go about maybe thinking about a career
in photography, in photojournalism, perhaps in travel photography.
I mean, I had absolutely no idea about whether you could even pursue this as a career.
I knew that people must do it because they had their images published in these

(04:26):
type of magazines, but I had absolutely no idea how I might find a path forward
into that type of career at that point.
And at that moment in time, I was in Lancashire in the Ribble Valley where I
grew up, returned home after university, was staying with my parents.
And I'd actually just bought myself a little darkroom and started to teach myself

(04:50):
how to print black and white photos.
And so I tried on my own to start making those first little steps into learning about photography.
But I was completely self-taught, and I have been throughout my career.
And that was the very beginning, really, converting my younger brother's bedroom
while he was away at university into a darkroom.

(05:13):
And staying up late and falling in love with printing my own photos,
I'd go out into the Ribble Valley, a very beautiful part of northwest England,
taking black and white photos mostly.
And I'd take books out from the library about how to develop and print black and white photos.
And I would teach myself and I would stay up until 2, 3, 4 a.m.

(05:35):
In the morning learning how to print black and white photos.
And so very quickly, I really started to fall in love with photography and started
to take the idea of pursuing it as a career a little bit more seriously.
Seriously that sounds like it really did uh get hold of
your heart and uh drag you forward with passion then
um i mean i i related to the two um to

(05:58):
things like national geographic as well in a way for my early
influences i know with the style of stuff i do now that
seems less likely but um guy called joe mcnally um
whose images i'd seen regularly and his
his expertise with creating interesting
lighting wherever he was just using little speed lights
it's carefully placed around a scene just fascinated me

(06:21):
so you know reading his books with the with the humor and
that in there it's um it kindled something in me as well but so you've got this
sort of passion with your photography and um you'd been studying zoology and
so on did you find a way then that they naturally could come together that you
could uh create something that could draw on both um.

(06:43):
Well, at that point, I didn't really know how to do that.
I had obviously the background of my studies in environmental issues in zoology,
and I had this new interest in photography.
But at that point, I hadn't put the two together. And it was actually after
I'd done an internship at Magnum
Photos in their London office that that finally started to formulate.

(07:07):
And that was very happenstance how that came about.
I mean, as I mentioned, I'd been spending weeks and months teaching myself how
to print black and white photos in my younger brother's bedroom.
And I thought, well, perhaps I can do something like an internship or an apprenticeship.
And so I went on the very fledgling internet in 2002, 2003, and found this agency called Magnum.

(07:34):
And I didn't really know very much about them.
And so I found a phone number on their website and I called them up and I said,
hi, I'm a young photographer.
Do you have any job openings or internships? internships
and very luckily they just
had an intern cancel um that

(07:56):
week and they said can you come down to london on
monday morning and do a month-long internship in the office and i i said yes
absolutely and i still didn't really know very much about the agency i knew
it was about photojournalism i knew
very famous photographers were represented by them um so i jumped on a

(08:16):
train and went down to London and slept on my friend's couch for a month.
And for a month, I basically made coffee and I handled the mail.
I returned all the prints that were coming back to the office because at that
time, obviously they were dealing still with prints and slides.
Yeah. Yeah. And so it was my job to file them back in the boxes and file them

(08:37):
back in the filing cabinets.
And really that month, my brain almost exploded because the photography,
the level of photography, The quality of photography and the type of photography
that the photographers that I'm sure most of your listeners know,
the photographers that produce that type of work, it's in a different realm,

(08:59):
a different level of photography.
It was the type of photography that I'd seen in those copies of National Geographic.
And after that month-long internship, they invited me to do a year-long internship.
So that was really my, my education and during that time, I had the chance to
obviously meet a lot of the photographers,

(09:21):
assist them, um, do a lot of work in the offices and helping on assignments, these types of things.
And that's when I really fell in love with photojournalism.
And I really decided by the end of that year, that I wanted to do.
Becoming a photojournalist was what I wanted to do, 100%. There was no doubt in my mind.

(09:42):
It's an interesting sort of set of coincidences there.
You happened to hit on probably the best company that you could have run without
knowing who they really were, in a sense, when you got in contact with them.
And then that opening being there right away, right place, right time.
It was absolutely ideal start for you in many ways.
Yeah, I think my naivety helped a little bit.

(10:04):
But also i like to think
i seize the opportunity and i think that applies
to many of us in our careers um whether
it happens at the beginning of your career
or in other parts of your career there are always those opportunities and it
depends whether you are open to those opportunities and whether you grab them
or not and i like to think that that was one of those moments in my career that

(10:27):
i i took the chance when it came up well you you picked up the phone and you
and you You got in contact.
So often people think you just things fall into people's laps,
but they don't. You've you've got to be active.
You've got to get out there and in a sense, make a little bit of your own luck.
Go after these opportunities when they arise.

(10:47):
So, yeah, when you were working then with with Magnum,
was there any part of that where you would say it was actually deliberate tuition
or was it more sort of learning on the job as you get experience to the various
different aspects of the agency and the photographers?
It was learning on the job. It wasn't a formal program.

(11:08):
For most of the year, I was actually on the front desk, so answering phone calls,
dealing with the mail still, making cups of coffee when I needed to.
But also it offered me the chance to, like I said, be an assistant for the photographers
when they needed help on a shoot.
So I'd help photographers like Peter Marlowe, Stuart Franklin,

(11:30):
Philip Jones Griffiths, Ian Barry, some of the best British photographers,
obviously, who were based out of the London office.
And I had those chances to meet them, to see them, to watch them work,
and sometimes just literally to be a fly on the wall and to observe.
And I would just try to be a sponge and just try to soak it all in and try to

(11:52):
store away all those memories of how they worked, what they did that I think was good,
what I didn't think suited me as a person, but worked for them and just log
all those experiences away because I knew that they would all be incredibly useful in the future.
Absolutely. I think even just being in an environment where you're immersed

(12:13):
in good quality imagery,
your brain starts to get a handle on what good looks like, you know,
what composition is, how images can tell stories that little bit better.
So being a sort of a photojournalistic environment there, is that where you
felt your storytelling side of you started to develop?

(12:35):
Absolutely. I mean, having over a year's worth of exposure to that type of photography
almost brainwashed me to loving photojournalism in a good way.
During that year, I just realized just the power of photojournalism and the
ability it had and still has in order to tell important stories about what's happening in our world,

(13:02):
whether that's related to environment or politics or health or any other social issues.
It just made me realize that photojournalism has a place to really help people
understand what is happening in the world and about really important issues that affect us all.
Whether those issues are happening in the UK or halfway around the world here

(13:24):
in somewhere like China,
photojournalism has that power to be able to help us understand what is happening
in the world and inform us about what is happening in the world.
So what was it then about China that drew you out there?
Did some passion about something in particular make you want to go?
Was there a job opportunity?

(13:46):
Well, at the end of the Magnum internship, they actually gave us a small grant,
which was just enough money for us to buy a plane ticket, really,
to wherever we wanted to go in the world.
And so it wasn't a large amount of money, but it was just enough to give us
a kickstart to our career.
And that was the aim of it. And in the past, my father had actually been to

(14:07):
China many times on business.
He was a businessman, and he traveled to China during the 80s, 90s, early 2000s. Yeah.
He was a very well-traveled man. He traveled all around the world.
And actually, China, out of all the countries that he'd visited,
China was his favorite country.
And he always used to come home and tell us stories about China.

(14:29):
He'd bring back little knickknacks and gifts and photos.
And so that had a very deep effect on me. So when I finished the internship
and I had this basically blank canvas in terms of my career to paint, I thought,
you know, I literally opened up a map.
I took out an atlas at home and I said, well, where shall I go?

(14:54):
Let's try and pick a spot in the world and go there and try to start my career as a photojournalist.
Because one of the pieces of advice that one of my colleagues at Magnum had
given me was to pick my spot and to pick the kind of issues that I wanted to
cover, to try to carve out my own little niche in the world of photojournalism.

(15:15):
They told me that that was key to find your niche.
And so I thought, well, you know, I have no responsibilities holding me down in the UK.
So I thought, why not buy a plane ticket and go to China and start taking photos,
start trying to work on photojournalistic type stories and see where it takes me.

(15:39):
And so I literally booked a ticket to China and packed my cameras.
I didn't know anybody in China. I didn't know the language.
I booked a ticket to Beijing and I just went. So it was that bravado of youth.
That's quite brave, isn't it? Not knowing any better.

(16:00):
So how did you sell your first photo then, I suppose?
So if you've gone over there and you've not got the contacts,
you're not working for Magnum, Um, you've, you've left them at that point. So yeah.
How did you then go on to start selling your images and thinking,
yes, I can make a living out of it and not have to just, you know,
fill a book with some nice pictures and go home?

(16:23):
You know, at some point you've got to sell stuff, haven't you?
Sure. Well, the first trip to China that I made after the internship was for
just over a month. So I spent about a month in Beijing doing a couple of little stories.
And after that trip finished, I returned to the UK and I had a couple of little stories.
And i went to to
london i you know just jumped on a train and

(16:45):
went down to london and i'd managed to find some um some email addresses of
editors that i'd found online and so i'd emailed some editors and i'd said said
to them look i've just been to china i've got a couple of little stories would
you like to see them i emailed them some pictures and then i followed up by meeting them
in London and sharing some of those pictures with a physical portfolio and trying

(17:10):
to meet them to make some connections.
And I actually managed to sell a couple of photos.
I managed to sell some to a travel magazine and I actually managed to sell a
small gallery to the BBC.
They had a little online gallery and they ran a little portrait series that
I made of people posing in front of the Mao Zedong picture on Tiananmen Square.

(17:34):
And that was my very first little photo essay that I ever sold and had published
with BBC online on the very early version of the BBC website.
So it was from that, making a couple of hundred pounds from selling those photos,
that I thought, wow, maybe I can actually...

(17:55):
Potentially make a living out of this in the future. So after that,
I made a plan to return to China and I told those editors I was going back and
I wanted to keep the connection with them, send them some more stories.
And very slowly, I started to build up a network of contacts,
of editors in the UK, and also then starting to meet some of the other photographers working in.

(18:23):
China other journalists working in china and very slowly
i started to build up my network and i
was able then when i did make a
photo story i could then approach my network of
editors and try to
sell them the story build that
relationship and then after that slowly they

(18:45):
would then start to contact me when they had
a need for certain photos whether that was
a you know a photo essay that they needed or a
particular portrait of somebody they needed for their latest
magazine they would think of me because i
was based in beijing they knew me they'd met me
and we developed that connection and those

(19:06):
contacts and um that's obviously something that
is still now very very important is that that network
that you have and no matter what kind of photographer you
are whether you're a photojournalist or based in the uk doing a different
type of photography a lot of it still comes down
to your network and and those quality relationships
that you have with the with the

(19:29):
buyers of your photographs whether they're editors of
magazines or whether they're your your clients it always.
Comes down to those networks i feel it certainly
does yeah um you it's um
people say you know business is about people selling to people
at the end of the day so it's it is a very
important to have those relationships so speaking of relationships then

(19:50):
um how long did it take you to start to develop relationships
with the local community because you were saying when you initially went out
you didn't speak a word of the local language so were you effectively like living
like an expat in an expat community almost or how quickly did you find you were
able to integrate and um you know live with the locals.

(20:13):
Well, to be honest, at the beginning, I couldn't afford to live in the expat
communities because the expat communities are quite exclusive to the business
people or the diplomats and stuff like that.
So I had to live in more local, more suburban communities.
And so over the years, I mean, now I've been in China over 17 years and now
my Chinese is pretty good. But, you know, it took a long time.

(20:37):
I'm not a natural linguist, but I knew very early on that I needed to get up
to a certain level of Chinese if I was going to be able to just communicate both professionally,
but also on a daily life, just be able to communicate with people and make friends in China.
So, my level of Chinese kind of just developed over the years.

(21:00):
But obviously, when you're living in a different culture and your daily life
depends on it, it gives you extra motivation to learn the language and make
sure that you're integrating.
However, saying that, sometimes I do often work with a local translator,

(21:20):
fixer, if I need a different level of access to a particular community,
for example, or if I need to make sure that I'm getting 100% accuracy in the translations.
Because obviously with photojournalism, journalism in general,

(21:42):
we're producing stories where accuracy is very important.
So you need to work with someone who's able to give you that information very
accurately, and especially in the form of translation. Yeah.
Depending on the situation, I will sometimes work with a local translator as well, if needed.

(22:03):
Presumably, they have dialects as well of different types of Chinese,
because within the UK, we can easily lose sight of how extreme some of just
the accents are, never mind dialects.
And I certainly found when I was at university and I learned French and German,
and of course, I was learning high German, which all the foreigners learn.

(22:24):
And then I met the lady who was to become my wife and heard her talking to her mother on the phone.
And I thought, what on earth is that?
It's this really strong dialect from the south of Germany.
So I suppose sometimes when you're going around different villages,
do you need this translator, this kind of connection there to help you with,

(22:46):
A, more extreme dialects and B, also to just be accepted because they know them.
And otherwise you're a bit of an outsider and they're not too sure about you.
Absolutely, 100%. Because China, you have to remember, it's a huge country and
it has lots of different provinces and it has lots of different types of geography.

(23:06):
And there's not only different accents, but there are completely different languages
in different parts of the country.
So you're absolutely right. If I had to travel to a remote part of China,
for example, there might be a chance that they speak a whole different language.
So all those years I've spent learning
my classic textbook Mandarin is absolutely of no use, almost no use.

(23:31):
And of course, like you mentioned as well, sometimes hiring a local person will
actually help you break down those barriers much quicker than if I took someone,
say, from a translator or fixer from Beijing.
And if we traveled halfway way across the country to a small
village in rural southwest china that person

(23:53):
from beijing is going to be just as much of
an outsider so sometimes i
might actually have to try and find someone local to
that place which is obviously a lot more difficult sometimes but
uh it it has to be part of
the equation when you're thinking about where you want to work
because in some very remote locations um

(24:16):
you can't just turn up as a non-chinese person
and start taking photographs uh you have to find a way to kind of break into
the community to uh to find a way for those doors to be open so that you're
first welcomed into the community so that you can then um,

(24:39):
make the type of photos that you want to. And that's been true,
not just in China, but I also work in many other countries in Asia.
And that is always the case when you're trying to, especially with the type
of work that I do in the photojournalism space,
you're working on stories about people, about families, about communities,

(25:01):
about how they're being affected by these these big issues so
you often need to find a way to get
into communities and often working
with a local person a local fixer is
is one of the best ways to to be able to do that so i
wonder as well about um sort of cultural differences
when i first started going out

(25:23):
to germany um with with my wife and meeting family out
there um i horrified my mother-in-law one one
time by asking for pepper in a restaurant so i
could put salt and pepper on my chips she's just sort of staring
at me saying you you can't do that that's there's
not it's not the done thing and uh as you
may know as somebody who uh goes through airports uh on a semi-regular basis

(25:47):
um the brits like to queue not everybody else does though so the germans can
often just rushed to the desk rather than forming an orderly queue like the Brits.
So I wonder, was there anything that for you made you suddenly become aware
that actually, oh yeah, I am a bit different to this culture?

(26:09):
Oh, well, I realise that pretty much every day living here in China.
Like I mentioned, I live in a very suburban kind of area with not many expats.
So I'm acutely aware of being different. And, you know, I've made the conscious
choice to live here in Asia.
And unless you live in a really multicultural Asian city, of which there aren't

(26:33):
too many, maybe somewhere like Singapore, that's a very multicultural city where
you have people from all over the continent living there.
Even in a city like Beijing, there aren't a tremendous amount of foreigners,
if you say broke it down by a percentage.
So you always feel like you're a little bit of an outsider.

(26:55):
So that's always something that you have to deal with both personally and in
a professional sense when you go to different places.
Places um but you know
dealing with different cultures dealing with culture shock
dealing with these nuances of different culture that
is a constant a constant um

(27:18):
thing that you have to deal with uh living in asia and uh one of the hardest
things is when you when you go into the communities and maybe you're given new
food that you're not accustomed to eating but you know as i I was taught by
my mother brought up in the Northwest,
you eat what you're given when you're a guest in someone's home.

(27:39):
So that's gotten me into some trouble here in Asia a few times when I've been
presented with a few odd things.
But of course, if you're a guest, you have to eat them and you have to be polite
to your host because you're trying to ingratiate yourself to the hosts and the
communities that you're in.
But overall, the 99.99% of experiences of going to new communities of whichever

(28:08):
country it happens to be in,
I've found the overall welcome is entirely positive in most cases.
You just need an open mind. You have to have an open mind and you have to be
open to cultures and to be almost.

(28:28):
You know, it's hard to explain really because you can never become completely
part of the cultures that you embed yourself in.
But you can adapt a little bit of your own sense of behavior and your perception
of maybe space and how people interact with one another and people's behaviors with one another.

(28:53):
And you have to be acutely aware of that and you have to be very,
very adaptable because when I go into these communities, I'm often spending
a lot of time with people.
So you don't want to be the one that stands out.
As a photojournalist, you're trying to be that fly on the wall.
You're trying to embed yourself in, although you never will completely.

(29:16):
Completely and perhaps it's a mild delusion that
you are but you're doing
your best and if you don't want to be the
one person that's being awkward for everything or i
i don't want to i don't want to eat that i don't want to drink that
and you want to i think
it's uh one of the great things about moving into

(29:37):
different cultures is is just learning that
there are different ways of seeing things and that there isn't always
this kind of black and white that something's right
and wrong is initially you get this culture shock that
you think oh oh that's that's different and then
you then you start to appreciate perhaps a more nuanced way
of looking at things um i wonder whether perhaps

(29:57):
western culture is often very individualistic um i wonder whether that the the
asian one i've sometimes got the impression that it's a little bit more relational
a little bit more of group culture would you say that's right or not it's hard
to say really because it depends very much on the country.

(30:18):
Might depend on the place within the country because like
take china for example like i mentioned before it's such a
vast and diverse country that the
china's gone through some huge changes over
the past 50 60 years both politically economically socially
and so a life has changed

(30:38):
for many many people within the space of one lifetime but also
there's a big difference between life in the
cities the big modern cities like beijing shanghai hong
kong shenzhen but if you go into
the far interior of china i mean you can be stepping back in time almost if
you go to some places where you feel like you've gone back a hundred years now

(31:01):
people may still have their iphones tucked away in their pockets but the general
feeling of the of the culture um is very much from the past.
So it's hard to sometimes,
it's hard to pinpoint exactly what that culture is because Asia's changing so

(31:25):
fast and there are so many developing nations in Asia that are changing fast
and mindsets are changing.
So places or countries that might once have had the stereotypical image of being very communal.
Actually now in the modern cities, Many younger people are changing to that
more kind of individualistic mindset, but then that's sort of,

(31:46):
that's in contrast and clashing with their parents or grandparents' generations.
And different countries are changing at different speeds.
So, to be honest, this is part of what makes Asia especially endlessly fascinating.
Because you have all that different mix of traditional and modern cultures and

(32:06):
Asia's obviously changing so fast that you're constantly trying to keep up with
what's happening and how cultures are changing and how attitudes are changing
and how individual people's attitudes are changing.
And the young people are different from the older generation.
So you're constantly trying to keep up. I think that's one of the things that

(32:28):
is just so fascinating about cultures and so on, is that it's so easy to paint
everything with one brush and broad brushstrokes and think,
oh, everybody's like that. But it just isn't true.
And the more you look, the more nuances there are, the more people are changing,
growing and in different directions within the same country, within the same area.

(32:48):
So, yeah, I find that sort of thing is really interesting.
Interesting i often sort of joke though about norfolk where i live that if you're
getting off the train and they go you're now arrived in orwich where it's 1915
and i think yeah that's probably about right where we're only about 100 or so
years behind everybody else yes.

(33:10):
But um when you when you're going out into
some of the perhaps more um remote communities
where they're perhaps not used to uh engaging with
somebody from the uk or someone from europe on a on a regular
basis do you find you kind of have to go
in almost without the camera to begin with to to
get accepted or um how do

(33:31):
you do you have a if you like a process that you go through to before you'll
start shooting because i can imagine that to see someone turn up on the street
and start taking images well for a start the body language is not going to be
great because they're going to be thinking who on earth are you but you know
um they might start to get suspicious of you and think, well,
what do you want? What are you doing here?

(33:52):
Sometimes, yeah. The type of stories that I work on, I tend to try to pinpoint
specific communities that I think are representative of the story that I want to cover.
So with environmental issues, I cover mainly issues surrounding the climate crisis.
So I cover different issues surrounding climate change, deforestation,

(34:15):
desertification, species disappearance, all these different types of environmental issues.
So what I will try to do to represent these big issues is try to find good examples
of small communities where that are being affected by these large issues.
So that might mean I might focus my attention on a town or a village or even

(34:39):
try to tell the story through one family.
So, of course, if I turn up in a random remote town or village,
which is normally not on the tourist path,
then, of course, people are going to be a little bit suspicious about someone
not from their community turning up.

(35:00):
It's natural, isn't it, really? I think we're all that way. Absolutely.
Very, very natural. So the only thing that you can do first is to explain yourself
to the people that you feel you need to explain yourself to.
For example, I worked on a story about droughts in India during a particularly
bad drought back in 2016.

(35:21):
And with the help of my local fixer, we identified this one village that we
thought would be a good example of droughts.
Local people being affected by these terrible drought conditions.
And so my local fixer had managed to find a contact within the village.
And so we went out there one day and we didn't know if we would be accepted,

(35:44):
but we turned up in the village and we were led into a hall because they'd been
forewarned that we were coming.
A little village hall and in the village
hall were a group of elders and they all sit
around sat around very solemnly um looking
at us and for five or ten minutes i
sat there and with the help of my translator explained what we were doing there

(36:08):
and why i wanted to visit their village and and take pictures and they listened
very carefully and very attentively and then they They started to ask me questions
and when they started to ask questions,
then we had a conversation and we started making some rapport,
building some rapport and making some small jokes. And I mentioned I was from the UK.

(36:31):
I mentioned I was a football fan. And so we started talking about football and
suddenly the ice is broken a little bit.
I find out someone supports Manchester United and I tell them I don't like Manchester
United, but we laugh about it.
And suddenly you know
you have to be very personable and you know you're
trying to make people realize that you're not a threat and

(36:53):
you're there to highlight what's happening in
their community um from a journalistic perspective to tell
tell people what is happening but it's that
relationship building at the beginning and and
breaking down those barriers and building up trust at
the beginning uh that's really
the key and so for that particular story we went

(37:15):
back every day for about a week and a half to
the same village meeting the same people again and
again and actually after a few days they kind of all
the villagers lost interest in me they were like oh here's that that that crazy
guy from england with a camera who's just like hanging out in our village taking
pictures and after a while they lost interest which which was great for me because

(37:38):
then people started to act much more naturally and i could get those much more natural.
Photojournalistic images do you tend to share any of the images afterwards with
the communities that you've been in and do they have any kind of a sense like
when you leave that they understand that you've been sharing some of the story

(38:00):
that they might be struggling with is there any sense that they're grateful about that?
How do they tend to feel about it? How is it normally left? Do you just disappear
or is there any contact maintained?
It depends on the story, really, and depends on the community.
If I've built up a really good relationship with the community,

(38:20):
then I might stay in contact with a couple of people or the community.
But for that particular story that I just mentioned, it was quite a good example
because at the end, on the last day that we were visiting that village, the night before,
I'd actually, during my time in the village, I'd done a portrait series of people from the village.

(38:43):
Collecting water. So during one of the times where the government was delivering
water, people were queuing up to collect water in these large little canisters.
And so I made a portrait series of lots of different villages.
And the night before the day we were due to leave, I actually printed them all off.

(39:06):
And we had a little pop-up exhibition in the village.
Nice. So on the walls of the village hall, where I'd met the elders at the beginning
of my time, I actually stuck up all the prints of the portraits of the villagers.
Nobody knew about it. So they just, everybody turned up and saw us putting up these pictures.

(39:29):
And then people were able to take those pictures back home with them.
So if they saw themselves, they could take them home with them.
And so that was my little kind of.
Thanks to that particular community for for
them welcoming me and being so kind to me
while i was there and so hopefully that gave them
a sense of you know me as a photographer the type

(39:50):
of work that i was doing but also left them
with a a good impression uh of
myself and also of photography and photographers in
general so i wasn't just going to their community and
then disappearing appearing without saying anything it
was much more of building a a respectful relationship
between me and that community i think

(40:13):
that's great because that gives you potentially the the
opportunity to go back but also for others you haven't gone
in there and behaved disrespectfully and then they think well we're never
having a photographer in our village again after that experience
so they get uh it's an important important sort
of thing so when you're telling these stories a lot of what you said
was about um uh environmental issues climate

(40:34):
change issues and so on so uh we
get quite used to perhaps seeing statistics and
things being flung around and uh scientific reports about
climate change um so convincing us us with the uh or trying to convince people
with the with the numbers with the scientific analysis um what What role do
you think then that these sort

(40:56):
of photo stories have alongside these more sort of scientific reports?
What role do they play? What can they do that's different to help change people's minds?
Well, I think photojournalism has an incredibly important role to play in reporting
issues around the climate crisis.
Because as you said, I think most people, when they think about the climate

(41:18):
crisis, tend to think of statistics and numbers and sometimes get a little bit
overwhelmed in terms of the scale of the issue, the fact that it's a global crisis.
And sometimes it's hard for people to actually visualize what is the climate crisis?
What does it actually look like? And how does it affect people.
Communities in different parts of the world

(41:39):
and so i think photojournalism just the
nature of photojournalism telling stories
through photos has a really special power in being able to do that and by getting
my stories published with international media that's my small way in trying
to play a part in raising awareness about the climate crisis,

(42:03):
which is obviously such an important issue now.
I mean, when I started my career, it really wasn't reported very much in the news.
I mean, maybe some people learned about greenhouse gases or the greenhouse effect
in their school book at university, at school, but no one was really talking

(42:24):
about it in the mainstream media.
But that has really shifted in the past 15 or 20 years.
So I'm glad that my work has been a small part in helping that shift in perception
of climate change issues.
And I think photography, not just in the classic sense of classic photojournalism,

(42:47):
but in different types of photography as well, through portraiture and art photography,
many different photographers and artists are using photography.
The medium in different ways to raise awareness about climate change,
about other environmental issues that are affecting us all.
So I think photography is incredibly important in helping us visualize these

(43:11):
big global issues and perhaps sometimes focusing our attention on important issues.
Other times making us think a little bit differently about these issues through
photography and the way the
artists use photography to to communicate these
issues and i think all of this is really

(43:31):
important in playing into this overall dialogue about and
making us realize why the climate
crisis is so important to know about and understand yeah
the photographers approach it from
different perspectives i mean there's benjamin von wong who does
it from a very sort of artistic perspective perspective like actually
collecting thousands and thousands of bottles and things and making

(43:54):
like a sea of plastic and all this kind of
thing uh clearly that's deliberately stylized
and they're often quite highly edited now when we think of
photojournalism and um well we
think of images in the media and we think about ethics of those
images so when you're photographing real life rather than
trying to create a um a piece of art as

(44:15):
such um what do you think then uh
is appropriate if anything for actually editing images do you just take and
it comes straight out of the camera and off it goes or is there room for any
editing do you think in in your sort of style of photojournalistic photography.

(44:36):
Well, I'm a little bit old school in this approach. I don't think there should
be any editing done to images.
And in that, I mean, you know, the basic editing in terms of adjusting contrast.
Brightness, a little bit of saturation, maybe a very bit of light cropping.
That's pretty much all I'll ever do to my photos.

(44:59):
Photos i mean having come from that that background
of doing the internship at magnum and learning
about photojournalism in in that respect is very much the unaltered image and
i think that's really important for photojournalism now obviously in other types
of photography photographers have a little bit more freedom and at the end of the day there are

(45:24):
no hard and set rules out there,
but I feel for photojournalism, I think it's really important to preserve the
integrity of photojournalism,
especially these days in the days of AI and the fact that everybody has Photoshop
and everybody can do anything to a photograph.

(45:45):
I think it's actually really important now for professional photojournalists
to be open Open with the fact that they don't alter their images and be proud
of the fact that they don't change their images.
Now, you know, if you again, if you work in a different field of photography
where you have more creative freedom, where you are more of an artist,

(46:06):
then, of course, you can manipulate and do whatever you want to your photographs.
But I feel for photojournalism and documentary photography, reportage photography,
whichever you want to call it. But I still think that...
So quote unquote manipulating an image should be kept to the very minimum of

(46:29):
just adjusting the basic parameters of an image and, of course,
never adding anything to an image and never taking anything out of an image.
Do most of your clients that you'd sell these kinds of images onto then,
do they have a policy about that, that these should not be edited in that kind of way?
Because, especially with AI and so on, I think there's beginning to become an

(46:54):
issue of trust with people when they see an image. Is it genuine?
Yeah, very much so. And, you know, with the clients that I tend to deal with,
because, again, they're in the editorial space. So we're talking magazines and newspapers.
They all, on the whole, adhere to those classic rules of photojournalism,

(47:15):
of not editing photographs,
of not adding anything, not taking
anything away, of not now creating anything in AI or with Photoshop.
So most of those publications still have a strict policy on that.
But, you know, it's interesting because I think this is now becoming more in
the public eye, obviously, with what happened recently with the royal family

(47:39):
and the images that were released by the royal family.
The idea, the notion of trust...
In images online is now something that people are actually thinking about.
The general public are thinking about it, whereas before it might have been
something that might have been just in the professional photography field.

(48:01):
Now it's becoming something that is a bit more generally thought about,
which is quite interesting.
But it's important for people to think about that,
especially in this day and age where we're all being fed news and images in
our little echo chambers online and news literacy and the ability to critically

(48:24):
think about the news and that news also includes photos.
I think is really important for people to think about.
So just seeing that dialogue now appearing in the public sphere, I think is a good thing.
It's been quite slow developing in a way
because it started to come through in

(48:45):
aspects of beauty photography a while back about how
much retouching is acceptable are you creating something
which is physically impossible that's therefore potentially
making uh children ill as
they look at that as a something that they're supposed to aspire to
a perfection that can't even exist but we still
in in like in a lot of my world with

(49:07):
product photography things have to look kind of
unrealistically perfect you know if
you if you do do an image of a of a sandwich that you might
buy from a store it's never going to look like it is in the
photo if you're buying a nice shiny new product any
little tiniest bit of dust or anything that's on there's got to be retouched
out so we've got this weird mix where on the one hand we almost know and like

(49:32):
being lied to because we want to see perfection but on the other hand in other
areas we're beginning to kick back it It's an interesting dynamic, I think.
It is. And, you know, again, that's the interesting thing about photography
in that, you know, those fields are very, very different.
And I certainly wouldn't apply the kind of quote unquote rules that we have

(49:54):
over image manipulation in photojournalism to say product photography.
I think those are, and fashion photography is just completely different.
But you're right. It's interesting as people start to think about these things
more and talk about them more and try to find, okay, where are the lines? What is acceptable?

(50:16):
You know, what's acceptable for a professional and what's acceptable for,
you know, your grandma who just wants to send out a nice picture of her grandkids?
It's an interesting, maybe never-ending debate. Yeah.
Oh, I don't think there will be an end to that one.
No, I think everybody will have their own idea about what manipulating means.

(50:39):
Some people will say you can't add any sharpness in afterwards.
You shouldn't change contrast.
You should get the lighting as you want it in camera and so on and so on.
It's, yeah, I think a potentially endless debate there.
But if when you're taking a photo, then you've got these kind of technical considerations
because, yeah, they're not going
to be using other effects afterwards to create the look of the image.

(51:03):
You've got the technical considerations, but you've also got the storytelling considerations.
Which goes through your mind consciously? Do you think about techniques still?
Do you think about the story or has it become a kind of subconscious process
where you just engage through the lens?
The primary thing I'm always thinking about is the story. Because I think by

(51:25):
now in the stage of my career, technique has, the majority of those techniques
have become innate, really, when I'm out shooting.
I'm not really thinking about the principles of photography or the rules of photography.
And I'm not really thinking too much about my equipment either,
because I know my equipment so well.

(51:46):
And I use the same camera on the same assignments all the time.
So I know the camera inside out. I don't use a wide variety of cameras.
I try to stick to a small number of cameras that I know incredibly well.
So I can use them without thinking.
I can use them in the dark halfway up a mountain where there's no electricity and there's no light.

(52:08):
And for photojournalism, that's what you need to be able to do.
And so, yes, it is a balance, but the technical aspects have, like I said.
Have become largely just ingrained within me so that when I'm out shooting,
I'm really primarily thinking about the story and I'm thinking,

(52:31):
okay, I need to make a photo essay about this story.
I need to tell the story about this issue about climate change,
this community I'm photographing.
I don't want to be thinking about my camera.
I want to be thinking about how am I going to use the camera to communicate
the story and what things do I need to capture to help tell that story?

(52:56):
And so, am I getting the images that I need to tell that story,
to create maybe a photo essay that might appear in a magazine online?
Or maybe I'm shooting a short documentary and I'm trying to get certain shots that I need.
Those are the things that are primarily running through my mind. Yeah.
All the things that I've learned from my career and all those days when I'm

(53:20):
back in my studio playing around with equipment or learning how to use the latest bit of software.
You know, I've done that while I'm not shooting so that when I am shooting and
working on the story, I can focus just on on the story itself.
Yeah, that makes sense. And that time that you could spend thinking about technical

(53:42):
aspects of it could easily mean you've missed the moment in some cases.
Yeah, very much so. So you've got to be focused on the right thing about what you're doing.
But I just wonder whether there's ever that bit in your mind that goes,
oh, this could make a nice double page spread.
And if I leave some room for copy over here, I better make sure the subject's
not in the middle. Otherwise, they'll be in the fold.

(54:04):
Does that ever go through your mind, that kind of thing? or did you let that
sort of thing work itself out afterwards?
Normally I let it work itself out afterwards, definitely.
I leave that to the editors to worry about.
Yeah, it's sometimes one of those weird things when I'm shooting advertising
that I'm trying to think, well, what space do I need to leave around this?

(54:26):
Of course, if you're doing advertising photography and you have that freedom
to think about copying things, absolutely, that must go through your mind.
The thing is, it can almost be paralyzing when you've got too much to think about.
If you can be engaged in the moment, it's almost more of a mindful kind of process
of photography rather than can you go around and tick all the boxes technically

(54:48):
and say you've got everything correct, if you like. Yeah.
Yeah. With photojournalism, you do have to be in the moment, but really,
you know, out of all the time that you're perhaps working on the story,
95% of your time might actually just be the logistics of getting to the place
or preparing and setting up the contacts.

(55:09):
Doing all the groundwork to be in the right place at the right time with the
right people to make photos.
And so when you have that 5% of time, you've got to make the most of it.
So I'm not saying that photojournalists don't have any technical things to deal
with, like other types of photographers.
It's just the balance of it and when you do it, it's just different.

(55:32):
Difference yeah i i think it's important for people
to to remember that as well because sometimes some photographers
like to sort of lump photojournalists and sport
photographers in one camp because they know they tend to
have the the very fast shutter speeds on their cameras and
they sort of joke oh they go in there and they spray and pray and that
sort of thing and you think well you know when you've

(55:53):
put that amount of preparation in to
get a story and you've only got that opportunity you're
going to shoot as much as you can and be pretty darn
sure you've got it in the bag you don't want to shoot shoot one
and hope for the best you understand the way
that people work when you think about what is actually involved in the job it's

(56:14):
not just you're going from place to place to place with your finger on the trigger
the whole time exactly and you know it's really interesting to to speak to other
types of photographers and to you know learn about how they work and what they do.
Because even within the field of photojournalism, everybody works in slightly
different ways. Everybody has different approaches.

(56:36):
And so, you know, speaking to other types of photographers, listening to a podcast like yours,
which, you know, you interview and speak to so many different types of photographers,
I think it's really very useful because there's a lot that we can learn from
one another. Definitely. I think so.
We get so, you can get
blinkered if you stay within your own niche and you don't don't

(56:58):
look elsewhere absolutely i think that is a that is
that is the danger so for you then um are you
somebody who likes to look at the latest kit and look and
see if there's a new feature with the new cameras that might help you do your
job better that somehow you could justify it to yourself is worth the expense
or are you someone who's very happy with what you've got and you only buy something

(57:19):
to replace it when it's broken i i really don't like camera reviews and i don't
like looking at all the latest equipment the latest lens that
comes out of the latest camera body from whichever manufacturer,
it drives me a bit crazy, to be honest.
And that's why my own podcast, excuse the plug, is called The Camera Doesn't

(57:40):
Matter, because I don't feel that the camera determines how you...
Are as a photographer you know i really think it's
about you and your your personal vision and i
think there's a lot of there's a lot of content online that
really focuses on the latest brands the latest
models the latest lenses and i think it actually overly distracts people from

(58:05):
you know what really matters and you know that's the the vision of the photographer
the person behind the the lens behind the equipment and how they're looking at the world.
And I think that's the most important.
Well, and how you tell a story visually, the kind of visual language that we
all speak in almost without realising it and how you deal with lighting,

(58:29):
all these things, if we're not careful, just get subsumed under,
do you shoot mirrorless or not? Exactly.
Oh, come on. Yeah, I just think there's more joy to be found in photography
in the process of shooting and finding your particular vision.

(58:51):
Again, whether you work in photojournalism or product photography,
surely the goal should be to find your personal vision, your individual vision
about how you photograph what you choose to point your lens at.
I think that's more of an interesting journey for me personally,
but I'm fighting against the masses of camera reviews.

(59:16):
So with you, a lot of what you've been talking about, you can really sense that
there's a lot of passion that comes across there and different people are motivated by different things.
Some people mistakenly go into photography thinking they can earn money through it.
You know, it's a bizarre notion. I know they can become rich by being a photographer.
Reverse yeah what about for yourself then

(59:36):
what can you identify what the heart of
your motivation is for what you do why you get out of bed in the morning and
do what you do well i think it's a combination of different things i think everyone
has a different personal motivation for why they do what they do i think i'm
you know i a lot of my personal motivation comes from from family

(59:56):
and from you know i have a very positive a
generally very positive outlook on life and
as i explained earlier my my interests came you know from from my family from
photography came from my mother the interest in china came from my father so
i feel like these things are these are these are part of me these interests

(01:00:18):
they're they're part of who i am they're part of my identity.
Again, going back to the days at Magnum and falling in love with photojournalism
and really learning about the power and importance of photojournalism,
it's never really left me.
And there's something really magical about that day when you're about to leave

(01:00:41):
for an assignment and you don't know what you're going to discover.
You have your idea of this story that you want to cover, but you don't know
what you're going to find. You don't know what pictures you're going to discover.
And that feeling of butterflies before you leave, where you have your camera
in hand, your bags are packed and you're ready to go and you've got an exciting

(01:01:01):
assignment or an exciting personal project.
And you know that what you've
chosen it to shoot on that particular project is
something that you want to shoot of course
i take jobs where clients assign me subjects and
assignments sure yeah but the ones that really excite me
are the ones that i personally um found whether

(01:01:23):
that's the story idea or a place that i want to go to
and it's i guess it's always come down to
that natural curiosity i have about about the
world and photography for me has just been
this way for me to understand the world and the
camera is like this little magic ticket that allows you to gain access to all

(01:01:44):
these incredible places and and without the camera i don't think i would have
been able to get access to half of the places that i've been to and because
of the camera it's it's allowed me to to have a very,
very rich life of discovering all these different places and people that I've
been lucky enough to visit and people who I've met.

(01:02:06):
So how can you not enjoy doing that?
I don't know what else I would want to do.
So you don't find day-to-day motivation for work a problem?
You generally get up and get on with it? Well, no, I'd be lying if I didn't,
because freelancing life is difficult.

(01:02:28):
I'm not going to lie. I mean, there are lots of ups and downs of being a freelancer,
especially being a freelancer in a country like China, being still in a different culture.
You know, even though I've been here approaching 20 years, it's still a challenge sometimes.
And of course, you know, the pandemic was very difficult for everybody in photography.

(01:02:50):
Very difficult time. i know many photographers
who had to change careers it was a
sense of survival for many of us for many years and i was no exception so of
course there are ups and downs but i think generally on the whole um the motivation

(01:03:11):
comes from the importance that.
These stories have and especially around the climate crisis and you
know i have children and i want to do work
that they will be proud of to look at
in the future and to be able to say that you know
look this is what our dad was trying to do this dad was trying to document these

(01:03:32):
issues and try to bring people's attention to these important issues and for
me that gives me great motivation um to think about it from that perspective
on a personal level level.
So what qualities then and what kind of a mindset would you say if someone was
thinking of getting into photojournalism, they were thinking that that might be their thing,

(01:03:55):
what would you say that they should look out for in terms of their own sort
of skill set, their own mindset that might reveal to them whether it's a good
idea or perhaps not the genre for them?
Well, I think first you've got to be quite self-driven. If
you're going to be a freelance science photojournalist uh especially um because

(01:04:15):
like we mentioned before there are lots of ups and downs you're
constantly hustling you're constantly chasing you're
constantly coming up with ideas for stories pitching stories you've got to have
a thick skin you've got to get used to being rejected and people telling you
that that's not a good idea but then you have to be a bit pig-headed and sometimes

(01:04:37):
pursue a story when other people are telling you that it's not going
to work um so all of those qualities you need but i would say mainly you've got to have a.
Curiosity about the world an open-mindedness about the world and you know a
sense that you really feel that photography has a role for good in the world

(01:05:04):
about helping people understand
these important issues that are affecting our world.
And like I mentioned before, I think photojournalism has a very special place
in our media landscape to be able to do that.
However, it isn't an easy career and it's not for everyone.
So you have to really decide if you are really passionate about telling those

(01:05:30):
type of stories, whether that's environmental issues or other issues in the
fields of photojournalism.
If you don't have that passion, then it's probably not going to work out in the long term.
So you need to find out about what issues in the world that you're really passionate
about learning about and you're really determined to try to communicate with photography.

(01:05:56):
And I think that's the most important thing. And if you're able to find that,
then you might have a chance. Yeah. Yeah.
When you're thinking about when I look at your website, for example,
you've got quite a lot of awards on there, quite a lot of publications that
you have been with, places that you've spoken and that sort of thing.

(01:06:17):
What sort of a role does that play for you in your business?
Is it partly about sort of establishing trust with potential future clients
or does it give you reassurance that you're on the right track?
What sort of role do you feel the awards play for you?
I think it's mainly really, well, it's twofold, really.

(01:06:37):
It's like you mentioned, it gives your clients a little bit of trust in you
if they see that you've worked with other clients and maybe have won some awards.
It might give them a little bit more faith that you're able to do a job.
But also on the other side of it,
if you are able to get some of your work into awards, Especially with photojournalism

(01:07:05):
and the type of issues that I cover,
it's actually an opportunity to get your work out to a bigger audience and get
the story in front of a bigger audience and get more attention.
And so I've actually had a lot of opportunities come from, while I'm not chasing
the award specifically,
I know that if the story picks up an award, it will open more doors to getting

(01:07:28):
that story published and getting more people to see that work and to learn about
that story. And it might lead to another publication.
And sometimes I've had stories kind of snowball a little from picking up one
award to then pick up another publication and then another publication because
it's a little chain reaction.

(01:07:49):
So, in that respect, that has been the most pleasing thing about getting some
awards is the fact that it leads to other opportunities and other chances for
these stories and these issues to be seen.
That's an interesting perspective on it, because I think you don't necessarily
get so much of that in other genres where it's more about sort of a pat on the

(01:08:13):
head for how well you've done as a photographer, almost.
Whereas here, there is obviously that aspect to it.
But you're also then thinking, yeah, but if it gets more credibility,
that might not be the right word for it, but, you know, more behind it as a
story that others are then perhaps will pick up on it and share it when they
might not have done before.
And so you're getting your message through. um it's not just

(01:08:35):
then about about the image itself so yeah that's a
that's a very interesting um perspective so speaking
about these stories and and your website and that where's where are good places
for people to go and look if they want to see some of your work if they want
to follow along with what you do sure well my main website is uh gallagher hyphen

(01:08:56):
photo.com and so that's got all my main stories on there.
I'm also very active on my two main social media platforms are Instagram.
I'm on there as Sean underscore Gallagher underscore photo.
And I've also got a YouTube channel now, which I just started in the new year,
where I share lots of tutorial videos, actually.

(01:09:19):
So it's a little educational branch of my work,
sharing how I work on assignments, sharing um
breaking down some of my photographic techniques
from my photo stories through youtube videos so
people can find me on on youtube as well and as we mentioned before i've just
started a new podcast called the camera it doesn't matter where i'm actually

(01:09:40):
interviewing other photographers mainly in the field of photojournalism um to
to learn about their work and speak to them how they They do photojournalism.
Right. Okay. So plenty there for people who are interested in your genre,
but people also outside of that learning different aspects of photography through

(01:10:00):
your video tutorials and the podcast as well then.
Yes, absolutely. The YouTube channel is aimed towards amateur photographers
and also some aspiring professionals.
But there's a lot of general photography concepts in there, but also a heavy
sprinkling of photojournalism. as well.
Excellent. Well, it's been really interesting being able to talk to you.

(01:10:22):
Thank you very much for sharing your story with us and really do look forward
to seeing what other stories you unearth next.
Oh, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me,
Joe. Thank you, Sean. And thank you everybody for listening.
This is the Focused Professional Podcast.
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(01:10:45):
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