Mark Leech
Mark, what’s the story behind your number 1 photo?
My favourite photo is a picture I took right at the start, maybe that is why I like it so much. I wasn’t actually a photographer at the time, I was running film for another photographer, by that I mean I was collecting another photographer’s film from the football sideline and running it back to the darkroom.
During this particular match at Highbury in August 1974, I snuck in my Zenit B camera with a 50mm lens. After Arsenal scored the first goal the photographer I was ‘running’ film for, Joe Mann, was winding his film back in, and I decided to run over and take a photo of Brian Kidd who celebrated the goal by putting on a policeman’s helmet on his head. The crowd on the North Bank enjoyed this moment immensely.
I returned to the darkroom, and the printer said “we have got to print this and send it out”. I was really concerned that the photographer at the match, Joe Mann, would go mad and indeed my photograph was published in four national newspapers the following day. It was a start for me and I’d never seen my photographs in national newspapers before. The year before I’d been standing on the North Bank as an Arsenal fan. That’s why my shot of Brian Kidd of Arsenal is my number 1 photo.
Mark is a sports photographer and the founder of Offside.
“After leaving school in Harlow New Town, Essex at the age of sixteen I had a few dead end jobs. However, soon I found myself in a central London darkroom in October 1973, despite having never owned a camera or shown much interest in photography. I worked six days a week, mixing chemicals in a poorly ventilated space for £50 per month and it wasn't even as glamorous as it sounds.
The only thing that kept me going was the realisation that most of the images I ran around Fleet Street ended up in national newspapers, and I thought that if I stuck at it and listened to the senior guys, then I might have a chance to emulate them.
By May 1975 I was shooting the UEFA European Cup Final in Paris, my first ever time out of the UK, and six months later my father sold me his old Ford Cortina and I was out on the road as a full time photographer.
The company eventually gave me a raise but then started expecting miracles, and at the age of twenty, thinking I knew it all, I left to start as a freelance, not working for commissions but shooting under my own name and keeping my own material. This continued throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s until I formed Offside in 2001.
I've covered seven FIFA World Cups, three Rugby World Cups, including the memorable one in South Africa in 1995, a couple of British Lions rugby tours, and every UEFA European Championship from 1980 to 2016.
My main award was Barclays Photographer of the first 20 seasons of the Premier League, in 2012.”