Stefan Rousseau and AJ Heath: Photographer Profiles

Two very different working lives in photography: Stefan Rousseau covers British politics daily for a national news agency, on a rota set by Westminster and by whichever crisis is running that week. AJ Heath makes slow, posed documentary portraits abroad, and published a book built from a studio set up in a public square. Put side by side, they show how far apart the deadlines, the access and the editing can be within the same profession.

Stefan Rousseau

Stefan Rousseau is the chief political photographer at the Press Association, now PA Media. That is the title used in Channel 4 News, which published a selection of his pictures of the political year on 30 December 2023 and described him as the Press Association's chief political photographer. The same title appears on the National Council for the Training of Journalists listing for a PA Media insight event, which adds that he has spent 25 years with the agency and has photographed prime ministers from Tony Blair through to Sir Keir Starmer.

The job is agency work, which shapes everything about it. An agency photographer files for every subscribing newspaper, broadcaster and website at once, usually within minutes, and has no second chance at a moment. Political coverage adds its own constraints: pooled access, fixed positions, short calls, and long days in which the usable picture may last two seconds.

The range of the role is visible in that Channel 4 News selection of his pictures from 2023, which notes that the year's work took him well beyond Westminster, from Liverpool to Rwanda. A political photographer at a national agency covers party conferences, by-elections, foreign trips, budget days and doorstep arrivals, and the same small cast of politicians appears in all of them.

For anyone looking at political photography as a practice, the interesting part of his work is repetition. Photographing the same handful of faces for a quarter of a century forces invention: different light, different height, different distance, or waiting for the unguarded second after an official moment ends.

AJ Heath

AJ Heath is a London based documentary photographer who completed an MA in photojournalism and documentary photography at the University of the Arts London in 2014, and whose work has been published by outlets including The Times, The Guardian and Al Jazeera.

His principal published project is a book of portraits made in Bhutan, Way of Harmony: Portraits from Bhutan. Reviewing it in The Spectator of 16 December 2017, Sara Wheeler described the method: Heath lived in the country for a year, and over three weekends he set up an open air studio in the main square of the capital, Thimphu, and invited people to be photographed. The portraits are posed against a black background with each subject facing the camera, and the book prints the questions he asked opposite each picture, together with the answers, often about what makes the sitter feel Bhutanese or happy. The review records the book as running to 128 pages and published under Heath's own imprint.

Earlier work includes photographs made in Afghanistan in 2010, during three weeks embedded with the Coldstream Guards in Helmand Province.

The Bhutan project is a useful example of a formal strategy that documentary photographers return to often: build a fixed studio in a public place, keep every variable constant, and let the differences between people carry the work. The constancy is the point. When the background, the light and the pose do not change, a viewer reads clothing, posture and expression far more closely than they would in reportage.

Agency news and the long project

The two practices on this page sit at opposite ends of a spectrum that most working photographers move along during a career.

• Who decides the picture. In pooled political coverage the position, the timing and often the distance are set by someone else. In a studio project the photographer sets all three and the subject agrees to them.
• How the edit happens. Agency pictures are edited in minutes by a picture desk against the needs of that day's story. A book edit may take a year and is judged as a sequence.
• What survives. News photographs are indexed and licensed through agency archives and resurface for decades whenever the subject is back in the news. A self published book has a print run and an ISBN, and after that depends on libraries and collectors.
• Consent. Public figures at public events are photographed without asking. Posed portraits of private individuals require a conversation, and in Heath's case the conversation became part of the book.

More profiles of photojournalists and documentary photographers are indexed on our speakers page. Related pages include Travis Hodges and Rob Pinney, which covers a news photographer working as an agency stringer, and Jeremy Nicholl on foreign reportage. The full archive of talk pages is listed under events.

This page takes its address from a London photography talk listed for 8 May 2018. This site is an independent journal, is not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group or with theprintspace, and does not organise events.