Life through a lens

“Like most professional sportsmen, I left school without any qualifications. But unlike most professional sportsmen I had other creative strings to my bow. I think visually and have a good eye for what makes a great picture. Having been a photographer for as
long as I’d been a footballer, I had another skill set to fall back on when I quit the game.

“I was never a typical footballer. I never thought like one and was never accepted as one either. I wasn’t down the pub or at the betting shop like all the other players. I earned money playing football; I spent it taking pictures. And rather than hang out with other footballers, I would spend all my spare time with press photographers and creative types, learning little tricks from them. For example, I used to put Vaseline round the edge of the lens to create a blurred effect at the edges.

“My obsession started with a second-hand Zenith EM camera that cost me £64 – eight weeks’ wages for a Middlesbrough boot boy. I’d looked at that camera in the shop window every day on the way to and from training for months. I remember running to the shop in my Boro tracksuit with the money, panicking in case it had been sold.

“From that point on I used to photograph everything and then send visual letters back to Australia of life in England, writing long captions on the back. Middlesbrough, with its misty cobbled streets, was such a different world to the one I’d grown up in.

“As I earned more money I was able to buy more expensive photographic equipment and it became more than just a hobby. When I moved to Liverpool I actually started a photography business in Bold Street and had a studio. At home in Anfield Park I had a darkroom with the old fashioned enlarger and the chemicals, while upstairs was a studio.

“My team-mates soon got used to me taking pictures of everything and that got me the kind of access that no photographer would ever have. This was in the days before players did their own home movies. I’d give them copies of the pictures and when they saw that I was pretty good, they would ask me to take portraits. They’d say ‘Oh, can I bring my kids over to your house to take some family pictures?’ Alan Hansen, Graeme Souness, Ian Rush – they all came over and I’ve still got all the pictures. Some real classic 80s shots. Hansen was telling me only the other day that he’s still got all the pictures I took on display in his study.

“Most players have a bit of money to play with when they retire but as Liverpool froze my assets I literally didn’t have a cent. So I had to use my photography skills to get myself a job as a producer at a TV channel in Australia. It was like second nature to me – only it was moving footage rather than stills.

“And now, years later, I travel the world as a professional photographer. People thought it was just a fad, but I’ve made a new career out of it.”