Don McPhee, 1945-2007

All too often newspaper photographers just vanish. As the witnesses of history we are rarely written into it. And we often like it that way. We want to be invisible.

Photographer Don McPhee passed away after a long career with the English newspaper The Guardian. There is a great slideshow of his work narrated by Guardian head of photography Roger Tooth, that I recommend watching.

From Don McPhee’s obit, words I wish I had thought of in several occasions:

Don was very much his own man, so I was always nervous of asking him to send any additional photographs from a shoot, down to me 200 miles away in London. “You have what I saw,” he would say, and what he saw was just right.

Also, a post on Guardian photographer Dan Chung’s blog about McPhee.

Gone but not forgotten.

This post first appeared here.