Charlie Bibby and Chris J Ratcliffe: Photojournalist Profiles

Charlie Bibby and Chris J Ratcliffe both make news and editorial pictures in Britain, but from opposite sides of a divide that shapes the whole trade: one has spent a career on a newspaper staff, the other works freelance with agency distribution. They were billed together for a London talk on 18 February 2020.

Charlie Bibby

Bibby is a Financial Times photographer. A profile of him published by Photomonitor in June 2018 sets out the career: he began working part-time for the FT in 1999, joined the staff in 2005, and was by then the paper's chief photographer. The same piece records that he trained in photojournalism with the National Council for the Training of Journalists, won the UK Picture Editors' Young Photographer of the Year award while at a news agency, and was shortlisted for Photographer of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2006, 2007 and 2016. That chief photographer description dates from 2018; his current role and recent work are listed on his FT author page.

The range described in that profile is unusually wide for a single staff job: 42 countries across all seven continents, the Arctic and Antarctica, Medecins Sans Frontieres in the Congo during a typhoid outbreak, food security reporting in the Central African Republic, and every UK general election for two decades. His own account of why he photographs is plain enough to quote.

"I can't write well so I use photography as my way of communicating."

His best known single picture is a portrait of David Cameron made for the FT after an interview at Downing Street, showing the then prime minister checking his appearance in a mirror. Photomonitor records that it was shown in the 2017 Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition and entered the National Portrait Gallery's permanent collection, where it is catalogued.

Chris J Ratcliffe

Ratcliffe is a London-based editorial, portrait and commercial photographer. His Creativepool profile lists Getty Images, Bloomberg, Agence France-Presse, Greenpeace and WWF among the organisations that commission him, and names the British Press Photographers Association as his trade association. That profile is self-written, so it is best read as a statement of how he describes his own practice.

The work itself is easier to check than the biography. Pictures credited to him are distributed through Getty Images, where his London news coverage includes set-piece political and protest assignments, and Bloomberg's photo distribution has carried images credited to Chris Ratcliffe, among them a 2016 picture of the then Bank of England governor Mark Carney at a press conference in the City of London. A 2015 round-up of British press photography awards compiled by BuzzFeed listed Christopher Ratcliffe among the finalists for Bloomberg Business Photographer of the Year, in a category won that year by James Glossop of The Times.

Staff and freelance: two different jobs

The contrast between these two working lives is measurable. The State of News Photography 2018, a survey of 5,202 photographers run by the University of Stirling for World Press Photo, found 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 stringers rose from 24 per cent in 2016 to 28 per cent in 2018. Thirty-eight per cent called their financial position difficult or very difficult. The report's caveat applies: everyone surveyed had entered the World Press Photo contest.

Staff positions of the kind Bibby holds have become rare enough that a single newspaper photographer can be newsworthy in himself. A London Freelance report on press photography quoted an FT picture editor describing Bibby as "our one staff photographer". What has replaced the staff post is the arrangement Ratcliffe works under: a freelance covering assignments that reach publications through an agency's wire, where the credit line names both photographer and distributor.

The two models produce different pictures. A staff photographer on a long brief can return to the same subject, build access over years and shoot for a feature that will run at length. Agency assignment work is paid per job and judged on reliable delivery of the required moment, which rewards speed, position and knowing exactly where the shot will be. Both skills are real, but only one of them comes with a salary.

Other photojournalists covered on this site are listed on the speakers index, with the full set of archived talk pages at events. Closely related pages here include Louis Leeson and Antonio Olmos on newspaper and NGO work, and the article on diversity in British photojournalism, which covers who gets these jobs in the first place. For venues and formats, see photography talks in London.