Patrick Eagar
Patrick, what’s the story behind your number 1 photo?
I have long been interested in wine and its production. Photographing it was, for me, the perfect antidote to cricket. In fact, in the early days the two blended perfectly. The county cricket season was always finished by the second week in September, and the French grape harvest officially commenced on the 21st. Climate change has changed things a bit. French vineyards now often commence the harvest in August, and the ECB schedule now continues to the end of September. In other countries, I always managed to find time between Test matches in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa to explore and photograph their extensive wine regions.
Le Montrachet is the most famous white Burgundy and, indeed, probably the most famous white wine in the world. It’s also expensive, and a bottle can cost anything up to £5,000. So nice photographs of the vines that produce the wine are desirable, the only problem being that the landscape is little different from the vineyards that surround it.
One day I spotted this horse box parked by the walled southern border. The driver opened the back and revealed a gorgeous-looking white horse. After a while he led it down the road.
Patrick Eagar is one of cricket’s most celebrated photographers, whose career spanned more than four decades. He photographed 325 Test matches, including 98 Ashes Tests, and was the only photographer to cover the first nine Cricket World Cup finals.
Patrick began photographing cricket in the 1960s, with his first official Test match assignment at Headingley in 1965. Over his career, he built an archive of more than half a million images, capturing many of the game’s defining moments and players. He retired from professional photography in 2011, and his archive is now owned by Popperfoto and images are available through Getty Images.