Diversity in British Photojournalism: Barriers and Initiatives

Who gets to photograph the news in Britain is a question with published numbers attached to it. They are partial numbers, drawn from membership lists, contest entries and byline counts rather than from any census of the trade, but they point the same way: press photography in the UK is narrower in gender, class and ethnic background than the country it photographs.

What the counted figures actually show

The clearest British numbers come from the British Press Photographers' Association. In May 2019 the BPPA published an open response to criticism of the gender balance of its Assignments 2019 exhibition. In doing so it set out its own figures: 40 of its 321 paid-up members were women, 18 of the 161 photographers who entered the exhibition were women, 148 of the 1,351 photographs entered were by women, and 10 of the 110 photographs selected were by women. The association also said that the curators chose images without seeing photographers' names or genders, and that the exhibition was not a competition.

The criticism that prompted it came from a group of freelances working as Women Photographers of the UK. Press Gazette reported the exchange on 28 May 2019, naming Suzanne Plunkett, Anna Gordon and Susannah Ireland as the photographers who wrote the open letter, and quoting BPPA vice chair Lynne Cameron saying the association was aware of the issue and working on projects to support female members.

Byline counting gives a second kind of evidence. Women Photograph has tracked the credits on front page lead photographs in a group of North American and European daily papers since 2017, and publishes the results on its data page. Writing in Nieman Reports in September 2019, the project's founder Daniella Zalcman gave the first two annual totals: 13.4 per cent of those lead photographs were credited to women in 2017, rising to 17.5 per cent in 2018. The same piece reported that of 8,665 photo-of-the-week credits recorded across nine outlets in 2018, 1,512, or 17.4 per cent, went to women.

The widest survey of the trade is The State of News Photography 2018, written by Adrian Hadland and Camilla Barnett of the University of Stirling and released by World Press Photo on 12 December 2018. It draws on 5,202 responses collected from 2015 to 2018 from photographers in more than 100 countries. The report's own caveat matters: everyone surveyed had entered the World Press Photo contest, so the sample describes contest entrants rather than the profession. Press Gazette, summarising the 2018 survey in its May 2019 report, noted that more than 80 per cent of participants were men, and that 68 per cent of the women who responded said they had experienced discrimination at work, citing sexism, lack of opportunities and family expectations as the leading barriers.

Class and the route into the job

Gender is the most counted axis, but it is not the steepest one. The NCTJ's Diversity in Journalism research, reported by Press Gazette on 5 May 2022, found that 80 per cent of journalists in the UK came from higher socio-economic backgrounds on 2021 data, against 42 per cent of the general workforce, and up from 72 per cent of journalists in 2016. Reporters were more likely to come from those backgrounds than editors, at 84 per cent against 73 per cent. On ethnicity the same reporting put journalists at 13 per cent non-white, level with the workforce overall and three points above 2016, while editors stood at 10 per cent. Class is measured there by the occupation of the household's main earner when the respondent was 14, and the figures are extrapolated from a subset of Labour Force Survey answers, so they carry a wide margin of error.

Photography adds its own costs on top of the ones journalism already imposes. The State of News Photography findings reported by the University of Stirling in December 2018 describe the economics. The share of respondents working full-time fell from 74 per cent in 2015 to 59 per cent in 2018, while the proportion working as freelances and stringers rose from 24 per cent in 2016 to 28 per cent in 2018. Of those surveyed, 38 per cent described their financial position as difficult or very difficult. A job that increasingly means buying your own cameras, insurance and travel, and waiting to be paid, filters out anyone without savings or family support before any editor makes a decision.

Organisations working on it

Several British organisations predate the current round of argument by decades. Autograph was founded in London in 1988 as the Association of Black Photographers; its own history page lists the founding signatories as Monika Baker, Merle Van Den Bosch, Armet Francis, Sunil Gupta, Michael Jess, George Shire and Lance Watson, and records the move in 2007 into Rivington Place, the purpose-built venue it occupies in east London. Autograph commissions, exhibits and collects work by artists using photography and film to examine identity, representation and rights.

• Women Photograph runs the byline database and grant programme described above. Its mission statement says the organisation "advocates for equitable hiring in the visual journalism industry" and provides funding, resources and platforms for women and other gender-marginalised photographers.
• Female Perspective, a photo agency founded by Tabatha Fireman, launched in January 2019 according to the Press Gazette report cited above.
• The Jerwood/Photoworks Awards fund early-career artists working with photography. The Photoworks page for the awards sets out the terms: applicants must be UK-based and between one and ten years into their practice, two artists each receive £15,000, there is no educational requirement or age limit, and applying is free. Removing fees and qualifications from an application is a small structural change, and it is the kind that shows up in who applies.
• The BPPA itself publishes on gender and representation and keeps the relevant posts gathered under a gender tag on its site.

The argument reached London talks in 2019

The subject was also discussed from a stage. The BPPA's own listing, Women in Photojournalism, records a free panel discussion on diversity in photojournalism at theprintspace, 74 Kingsland Road, on Tuesday 8 October 2019 at 7pm, with photographers Anna Gordon, Suzanne Plunkett and Chin We, chaired by Helen Healy, Head of Pictures at the Financial Times. Two of the three panellists, Gordon and Plunkett, had signed the open letter to the association five months earlier, which gives some sense of how quickly the argument moved from a disputed exhibition to a room with the FT picture desk in it.

This journal is independent, did not organise that evening and is not connected with the group that did. The listing is cited as a dated record of when the discussion was being had in London.

Reading the numbers carefully

Three cautions are worth keeping. First, almost none of these figures is a count of working photojournalists: they count members of one association, entrants to one contest, or credits in a chosen set of newspapers. Second, the UK-specific data is thin, and the most quoted global survey stopped in 2018. Third, byline counts measure commissioning decisions rather than who is available to be commissioned, which is why the BPPA's membership figure and the NCTJ's class figure matter alongside them: they describe the pool, not the selection.

What the figures support, taken together, is a narrow claim rather than a dramatic one. On every axis that has been counted, British press photography skews male, skews towards higher socio-economic backgrounds, and has moved slowly. What they do not support is any single explanation, which is precisely why the organisations above work at different points in the chain, from grants and commissions to collections and membership.

Profiles of photographers whose work touches these questions are collected on our speakers index, and the full archive of talk pages is at events. For how London photography talks and panels are generally organised, see our guide to photography talks in London, and for background on the venue most often named in these listings, the location page.