The remarkable career of award-winning photographer Simon Townsley has taken him from war zones to Royal kitchens and made him millions from selling a pioneering business to Getty Images.
The student demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the election of Nelson Mandela, the first Gulf War, the siege of Sarajevo, IRA bombing campaigns in England, the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales: each one is a key moment in late-20th century history and New Zealander Simon Townsley has snapped them all. He arrived in the UK in 1987 and won his first British Press Photographer of the Year Award three years later. He has since won two more, including this year. He is one of the best-known news photographers around.
The span of Townsley’s viewfinder is remarkable. He’s been under fire in innumerable war zones; sat with Princess Diana in her kitchen, shot portraits of celebrities, politicians and businessmen, including a testy Rupert Murdoch, then his ultimate boss; and encountered heartbreaking scenes at orphanages in Albania, Bosnia, Mozambique and Uganda. More recently, he has photographed comatose Covid-19 patients in an intensive-care unit; witnessed victims of the war in Ukraine and travelled to South Sudan, where 90% of the population are without access to electricity or clean water; photographed children freed from the clutches of Boko Haram in Nigeria and zombie drug addicts in Vancouver.
Out of these moments he has created starkly memorable images. As his most recent Photographer of the Year award stated, “There’s a stillness and poignancy to the photojournalist Simon Townsley’s work that belies the underlying heartbreak.”
Abysmal student
Growing up in Wadestown, Wellington, Townsley watched TV news every night and avidly read Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, and, of course, the Listener. Yet he felt “kept out” of where it was all happening, and didn’t know how to get there.
“I really was an abysmal secondary school student and suffered a great deal from bullying at school. I wasn’t a team-sport guy and I couldn’t cope with the unpleasant attitudes that came from that,” he says. “I just didn’t want to be there.”
Post-school, he got a job in the Department of Labour, but was “encouraged” to leave after a year. “I just wasn’t made for glide time – I never got to the end of what needed to be done because it was so mind-numbingly boring.”
All those years of being bullied at school left me with the feeling that if you’re going to be scared all the time, you might have to go somewhere scary.
Describing himself as a “bit of a bogan”, he got into dirt-bike racing and, one day, a friend in that scene lent him a camera so he could photograph their antics. Unemployed, on the dole, he suddenly realised “this is for me, this is amazing. I can do this.”
Although Townsley came from a professional family – his father, Graham, was a management consultant, mother Melda had a portfolio career of teaching, publishing, writing – there wasn’t spare cash for expensive whims like photography.
Relying on borrowed basic gear to hone his newly discovered craft, Townsley set about reading every book on photography in the Wellington Central Library and applied for the Wellington Polytechnic photography course. To the astonishment of many, he was one of 14 accepted. He loved the course, but failed to pass, as he refused to engage with anything except news photography.
To be the snapper on the spot, he built his own police scanner radio and would then turn up at the Evening Post or the Dominion newspapers and give them any pictures he’d shot. “I so wanted to get in there, and I got lucky. The picture editor on the Dom, John O’Brien, was a tremendous support. I got my first job through him, even though I wasn’t really that good at the time. Boy, did he make a difference in my life.”
After two years, Townsley went on his first international job, to Fiji, to cover the 1987 military coup that overthrew the elected government of Prime Minister Timoci Bavadra. “That did it for me. I was surrounded by photographers from all over the world. It was a big deal. On top of which we were in a tropical paradise. I thought, if this is how you can make a living, sign me up.”
Townsley went back to Wellington determined to become a member of the international press gang. He remembers telling the then-editor of the Dominion, Geoff Baylis (who had come from the UK), that he was leaving for Fleet St. “He laughed in my face.”
Did he ever get to show him how wrong he was? “Yes, when the Dom did a piece on me winning my first Photographer of the Year award, three years later.”
Audacity wins
Townsley’s break into Fleet St at 23 was pretty brazen. The once-famous central London headquarters of most of the country’s papers had been shattered as Rupert Murdoch, whose company News International owned the Times and the Sunday Times, took on the powerful print unions. Murdoch’s newspapers moved from Fleet St to Wapping, in the city’s East End. Security around the new premises was tight; no one got in without an appointment, and they weren’t being given out.
Confronted by a young, eager, appointmentless photographer standing in his office in News International’s new, supposedly high-security premises, the Sunday Times picture editor gruffly asked Townsley, “How did you get here?”
“I told him I just walked past security. And he said, ‘Well, congratulations. You’ve passed the first test.’ Within a few months, he gave me a contract.”
Townsley, now 61, laughs as he tells tales of his mix of naivety and audacity. He was clearly filled with the kind of fire that editors need from staff, but not everyone loved the upfront Kiwi style. “Some people felt threatened by this upstart Antipodean and there was a lot of anti-Australian sentiment because [Melbourne-born] Murdoch had smashed the print unions.”
Some Fleet St rivals who had worked their way up through UK provincial papers also felt he had not “paid his dues”. A few even started a petition asking the paper not to employ him. “There are so many young photographers trying to get work and people felt I shouldn’t be able to walk straight in and get a job on a national paper. But why not? I did my apprenticeship in New Zealand. I’d done the work.”
All that was forgotten as Townsley shot better, different, exciting photos. He was soon on a Sunday Times contract. In 1990, he got his first Photographer of the Year award at the British Press Awards, and a second one in 1994.
Early adopter
Then something seminal happened. Like many photographers, Townsley was frustrated by the faff of sending photographs to the paper in those pre-broadband days. “You could spend two hours taking photographs and then 10 hours trying to transmit the damn things. I thought there’s got to be a better way.”
Using the money that came with his prize, he invested in modems and a computer and made it possible for the paper to log into a platform and download them. Prompted by a friend, he decided to expand the idea into a company called image.net, which shared supplied photographs from the Hollywood studios and television companies to newspapers and magazines. It took off, and Townsley raised millions of pounds from investors to expand the business. As founder and chair, he had to give up his photography work to focus instead on building the agency. “So began the unhappiest period of my life, though I didn’t realise it at the time. I just lost my way, really.”
After the sale of the business to Getty Images (for US$20 million) in 2004, he returned to his camera, working on a personal project for two years. Focusing on the practical work of the oil industry, he found it therapeutic, if controversial. Some friends and associates were aghast at his subject choice. “As a photojournalist, you’re seen as socially aware, but I thought that was knee-jerk. I wanted to look closer at the whole industry.
I think the industry is challenged by AI. But I see it as an opportunity for editors, for all news organisations, broadcasters, to show that the truth is absolutely verifiable.
“We all use oil-based products; it’s clearly a demand-driven industry, like any industry. I did feel this terrible hypocrisy, having spent a lot of time with very wealthy businesspeople in the preceding few years, and realising there was much more to how business works than I thought when I was young and a giant leftie.
“I don’t necessarily blame the oil industry; I blame us for consuming the stuff. Oil is going to become too expensive to burn, and we shouldn’t be burning it, but we’re still going to need it, because it’s in everything. And it can be very important to the people whose lives depend upon it. There are a lot of contradictions around this industry, and I just hate demonising things. It’s not useful.”
Since 2018, London-based Townsley has worked on Global Health Security, a project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Telegraph Media Group. This takes him all over the world – Congo, Afghanistan, India, Mongolia, Brazil, Ukraine, Cape Verde, Sri Lanka, Japan – covering everything from drug trafficking and corruption to female genital mutilation and the Ebola virus.
He says being a photojournalist is increasingly difficult these days. “You have to fight much more to get access. And I think the industry is challenged by AI. But I see it as an opportunity for editors, for all news organisations, broadcasters, to show that the truth is absolutely verifiable. So that when you see something in a news organisation’s publication, online, or in print, you know that you can rely on that being absolutely the thing, not generated by some algorithm somewhere.
“To do that, viewers and readers have to spend money, and I’m amazed at how many people – especially in New Zealand – complain about terrible news services but won’t pay for a subscription.”
A friendly, compassionate man, Townsley has two adult sons with previous partners, and a 10-year-old daughter with his current partner. “I wouldn’t have planned it that way. But I have such great relationships with my boys.”
Therapy is a regular part of his life, not because he thinks he has PTSD, “but to help make sense of things. That’s pretty useful when you’ve done the sort of things I have”.
While we might think he’s brave to put himself into danger, to see the horrors that most of us would turn away from, he says he’s actually a very fearful person. “All those years of being bullied at school left me with the feeling that if you’re going to be scared all the time, you might have to go somewhere scary.
“We’re all scared of something, spiders or snakes, whatever. But no one should ever make someone else feel bad on purpose. If there was less of that in the world, we’d have a better place to live, and we wouldn’t have the conflicts that we have. It’s all driven from fear, which is absolutely at the core of everything I witness and experience.”
Simon Townsley will give the keynote address at New Zealand Geographic’s Photographer of the Year awards in Auckland on October 24. See nzgeo.com