keith waldegrave

by sam rhodes

Keith Waldegrave a photographers journey, from local newspaper apprentice, to international freelancer and finally finishing his career as senior staff photographer for The Mail on Sunday. Covering Queen, Princess Diana and a visit from the Pope, is marked by a desire to travel and be creative.

Some of his highest profile shoots came after pushing the subject for days on end yet, but, sometimes Keith found himself not having support from the newspaper executives in control.

One crucial piece of advice he gave was “you have to fight your corner big time.”

“I went to photograph the band Queen, one of the highlights of my early times with the Mail.

“I had the backstage pass, went night clubbing with them; it was pretty amazing stuff.

“I had pictures of them on stage, but I had nothing of them off stage.”

The band were staying in the Grand Hotel in Vienna, they posed on the staircase with big portraits on the wall and a chandelier in the background and for this one photo it took three days to persuade Freddie Mercury but after plugging away the shot finally happened.

But, when it went to the paper the chandelier was cut and you could only see the four of them, a huge disappointment for Keith.

Realising he was never good at pushing his way to get shots, he put emphasis on the value of doing your homework.

“Sometimes you have to take a ladder, you have to think your position through and learn from experience.

“I have to say I was never really any good at that, there are others that had much sharper elbows and were able to push their way to the front, but you do what you can.

“For example, Diana’s funeral, it was a Muslim prayer room in an office block right opposite the front door of Westminster Abbey and I’m sure this guy was making a lot of money out of renting out windows – I think we paid him about a grand.

“Because I was in the right position, it was more luck than judgment, but as Charles Spencer and the two boys, William and Harry, walked into the end of the Abbey, they were momentarily out of sight to the other cameras and the TV.

“He reached out and put his arms around their shoulders after they’d been walking, all in solemn silence behind the mother’s coffin and that made the paper.”

Keith was supposed to start his career by going to art college as part of a training programme but the NCTJ (National Council for the Training of Journalists) was offering an apprenticeship.

Having completed this over three years he had a certificate saying he was a trained photographer – Keith was supposed to attend art college once a week but never did as his trainer, Dennis Shedwell, didn’t believe in it or take much knowledge from it.

Believing he was heading for a career in an office as a drafstman due to his creativity and aptitude for design, even having an interview to be a cartographical drafstman, he pulled out despite being only weeks away from leaving school and not having a job until he saw an ad for a local paper as a trainee photographer.

“I was very lucky to work on a paper, the guy that was our chief photographer was a weird bloke but he was a very able photographer, and he was a firm believer in available light, ie, if you can avoid using a flash, you did.

“So if you had to use flash, you tried to bounce it off a wall or a ceiling, so you got more diffused or directional light, rather than a flashbang wallop type image.

“So many local paper photographers that I had working around me had quite the opposite viewpoint on that and did pictures at night, whacked a flash on it, and it looked like rabbits caught in the headlights, so it was quite a different sort of training that I picked up on.

One thing Keith has always had is the travel bug. In 1973 he travelled across Asia to New Zealand and became a staffer on the New Zealand Herald in Auckland.

Three years later he left New Zealand and travelled through South America for four months before returning to UK and freelancing for The Sun, Evening News and Daily Mail.

In 1977 he returned to New Zealand and freelanced, shooting for various New Zealand and Australian publications and in 1979 Keith left to move to Sydney and worked for News Ltd

“My dad was pretty upset with me throwing in a good job to go travelling.

“I had this huge drive and desire to travel which I eventually did in my late 20s as being a travelling photographer was something I just had an overwhelming desire to do.

Hard to choose his faveourite photo he shot, he did settle on Rudolf Nureyev in Italy.

Worried about his reputation as a diva, Keith found himself stuck in a traffic jam and, four hours later than expected, Nureyev was already at the theatre he was playing that night.

Leaving a note to arrange to meet the next day he expected for him to “throw his toys out the pram” yet the next day came and Nureyev was “lovely” and posed under a fig tree to complete the shot.

Not always as that lucky though when Keith prepared to capture Jean Marie Le Pen.

After leaving his camera out all day to remind himself to put a roll of film in, someone had picked it up and closed the back.

Taking photos of Le Pen in a “real venomous mode” he was thrilled until realising there was no film in the camera and had “no plan B.”

“Eternally grateful” for leaning the hardway, Keith does sometimes wish he had the luxury of modern smartphones earlier in his career.

Artificial intelligence is a worry for some modern day journalists and is consistently in the news cycle yet, this isn’t something that worries Keith as he said: “AI isn’t going to take over – you still have to have somebody out there to go and shoot the picture, somebody’s got to point the camera and hopefully this will continue to be people with an eye for photography, with a natural ability for composition.

“The number of times you see somebody who happens to be in the right place at the right time, which happens more and more now with citizen journalism, and you think, for God’s sake, why didn’t you just take two steps to the right and that would have worked really well but instead of that, you’ve made a complete fist of it, and it’s so frustrating.”

He believes he could’ve done 95 per cent of his working career on an iphone but is “deeply grateful for having had the best” out of his time in photography.