Jeremy Nicholl: Photojournalism, Projects and Published Work

Jeremy Nicholl is a British photojournalist who has spent most of his career on one subject: Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union. He came out of the London newspaper world of the 1980s, left it at the end of the decade, and from 1991 built a body of reportage from a region that most Western picture desks covered only when it was in crisis.

From Belfast to Fleet Street

According to the biography published with his May 2021 appearance on the podcast A Photographic Life, Nicholl was born in Northern Ireland in 1957, and his interest in photography was formed in part by the news coverage of the Troubles, which put professional photographers on the streets he grew up around. He began working in London and joined The Independent in 1986, the year the paper launched.

That timing matters. The Independent was unusual among British newspapers of the period for the weight it gave photographs, running them large and often letting a single image carry a page. Photographers who passed through it in those years came out with a strong sense of the picture as an argument rather than as decoration.

He left the paper in 1989 to concentrate on documentary work, and from 1991 specialised in reportage from Russia and the former Soviet Union. The Editorial Photographers United Kingdom contributors page describes him as a photographer who has specialised in photography of the former Soviet Union for a wide range of clients over about twenty years, and notes that his posts on the Russian Photos Blog have become essential reading for photographers fighting for their rights.

Russia as a long assignment

Working in Russia through the 1990s meant covering a country whose institutions, economy and public life were all being rebuilt at once, and doing it on commission for editors thousands of miles away. The work that came out of it is correspondingly broad: politics and conflict, but also commerce, ritual and daily life.

One picture from that period is on public record in detail. Nicholl's photograph of the changing room at the Sandunovskaya Banya in Moscow, the city's best known bathhouse, took second prize in the daily life category of the 1998 World Press Photo contest. The picture was made for the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and the contest caption records the bathhouse as a meeting place for Moscow's new rich. It is a good example of how the strongest work from that decade was often not from a front line. A crowded changing room in an old public bath says more about who had money in 1990s Moscow than a photograph of a politician would.

His awards include World Press Photo and Interfoto, the leading Russian competition for professional photographers. His archive site is jeremynichollarchive.com, where the picture library is organised for research and licensing rather than as a portfolio, which is itself typical of photographers whose main asset after thirty years is a deep file on one region.

Writing about photographers' rights

The second strand of Nicholl's public work is written. He has used the Russian Photos Blog to report on copyright, licensing and the treatment of photographers, which is how his name is known to many working photographers who have never seen his pictures. That combination is less unusual than it looks. Photographers who spend years negotiating syndication, agency contracts and foreign reproduction rights accumulate expertise that few lawyers and almost no editors have, and some of them end up publishing it.

He has also discussed the career in long form interview, including that podcast appearance, which is one of the few places a listener can hear the practical side of working as a foreign photographer in Russia described at length.

How foreign reportage from the region is organised

For readers new to this area of the profession, a few structural points explain why careers like this one are built the way they are.

• Specialisation beats generalism for freelances. An editor commissioning a story in Siberia wants someone who already has the contacts, the language and the travel knowledge. Depth in one region is a freelance photographer's main competitive advantage.
• The archive is the business. Single commissions rarely cover the cost of years in a region. Repeat licensing of an existing file does, which is why photographers of this generation run their own picture libraries.
• Competitions function as distribution. World Press Photo, the Amsterdam based contest and touring exhibition programme, publishes winning work internationally, which gives a freelance picture a reach no single newspaper page provides.
• Rights are the recurring fight. Foreign syndication, unauthorised reuse and contract terms that demand all rights in perpetuity are the practical issues that take up a working photographer's administrative time.

Where to see the work

Nicholl's own archive site is the primary source for his pictures, and the World Press Photo collection holds the 1998 entry with its original caption and credit. For the wider context of British photojournalists working abroad, our speakers index collects profiles of documentary photographers and photojournalists, and the events archive lists the full set of talk pages. A related page is Stefan Rousseau and AJ Heath, which looks at agency news work alongside a long form documentary project.

This page takes its address from a London photography talk listed for 13 March 2018. This site is an independent journal, is not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group or with theprintspace, and does not organise events.