Doreen Spooner

Doreen Spooner was the first woman to work as a staff photographer on a Fleet Street newspaper during a forty-year career, mostly on the Daily Mirror. Almost seven decades later, female press photographers are still a rarity and Spooner remains almost one of a kind.

Career

The Daily Mirror front cover July 23, 1963, carried this scoop by Spooner; the showgirls embroiled in the Profumo Affair meeting in a pub near the Old Bailey

Born in North London in 1928, she was encouraged in her career choice by her father Len, Picture Editor at the Daily Herald The Spooners were something of a dynasty in Fleet Street with several other men in her family employed on various papers. When Doreen was eight, her father bought her a five shilling camera from Woolworth and her love of photography took root. After taking a photographic course at college, Spooner worked for the Keystone Picture Agency then joined the Daily Mirror from 1949, employed by Simon Clyne, picture editor, at a time when almost every woman employed by British newspapers was a typist or tea-lady.^[1][2][3]

Daily Mirror

Her appointment was vindicated quickly when Spooner won the British News Picture of The Year award with her portrait of playwright George Bernard Shaw at his garden gate; an achievement which made her male colleagues sit up and realise she was their equal in every way.They even became fiercely protective of her, refusing to allow any swearing in her presence. Spooner claims that she met very little prejudice in her career and, if she did, she simply ignored it and got on with the job. Often those most surprised by the sight of a female photographer were other women. When she photographed Queen Elizabeth II when still Princess Elizabeth, the future monarch was so tickled that she commanded her lady-in-waiting to photograph Spooner with the princess's own camera. Another woman once greeted her with the words ' But i was expecting a man. Do you think your pictures will come out?' The only time she got cross was when the Mirror captioned her photographs with 'Camera Girl Doreen Spooner'. She retorted ' You don't call the male photographers Camera Boy, do you? And what will you call me when I get older...Camera Granny? ' The Mirror never made that mistake again.

America

Despite her early successes, she left the Mirror when offered a unique opportunity to tour America as a freelancer with the Keystone Agency, where she took remarkable pictures of Albert Einstein and the reclusive Amish communities as well as many studies of small town American life in the early 1950s. She then worked in Paris for Keystone and also for the new, iconoclastic Magnum Agency where she knew, and was inspired by giants like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, both of whom had worked with her father in London. In Paris, she also met Pierre Vandeputte-Manevy (later one of the photographers of The Beatles) and they married in 1952. They had three children and moved back to London in the late 1950s. Having semi-retired from photography to raise her children, marital problems and associated financial difficulties, forced Spooner to ask the Mirror if they might take her back. They eagerly did and it was the beginning of a long career which stretched from the glory days (when the Mirror achieved an extraordinary daily circulation of five million) to the rather less glorious days of its ownership by Robert Maxwell in the 1980s.

Swinging London

Spooner's first front page scoop came in the summer of 1963 when, in a shadowy London pub, she surreptitiously snapped Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, the two notorious showgirls at the heart of the Profumo Affair. Taking the shot from behind the door of the ladies' loo, Spooner then removed the film from the camera and hid it in her coat, in case the pub landlord tried to seize her camera, then rushed out praying the light had been good enough for a decent shot. It was and her name was made.

In the 1960s and 70s, Spooner worked closely with Felicity Green, the Mirror's famous fashion editor, in promoting the revolutionary fashions and styles of 'Swinging London', photographing all the iconic figures of those years: Mary Quant, Vidal Sassoon, Barbara Hulanicki of Biba as well as the great models like Twiggy of whom Spooner was especially fond. ' It was simply impossible to take a bad photograph of her.'

In the 1970s, Rupert Murdoch's Sun was eating steadily into the Mirror's circulation and the latter began to emulate the former's 'Page Three' photographs. Forced by their employers to take the shots, none of the Mirror photographers enjoyed doing it, largely because they found it professionally uninteresting, though Spooner maintains that models like Samantha Fox and Linda Lusardi never felt exploited. One of them famously remarked 'You never mind getting your kit off for Doreen. It’s like undressing in front of your granny!’^[4]

Spooner also took many memorable photographs of darker news stories including The 1984 Miner's Strike, The Zeebrugge Ferry Disaster, the Greenham Common Peace Camp and the Toxteth Riots. She also covered the royal tour of China in 1986 and was standing right beside Prince Philip when he made his famous 'slitty eyed' gaffe. 'Oh, you shouldn't have said that!' said Spooner.

Recognition

Doreen Spooner retired from the Daily Mirror in 1988. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Photographersic Society and was a member of the National Council for the Training of Journalists photojournalism board,^[5] and was sought for presentations on the industry up until 2013 (for example at the Royal Photographic Society lectures on Visual Journalism).^[6][7][8][9]

In October 2016, Spooner published her autobiography 'Camera Girl',^[10] published by Mirror Books, which was widely featured across the media including BBC Newsnight and the ITV News. Some details of her career are also to be found in "Ladies of the Street" by Liz Hodgkinson,^[11]

References