A post-work beer with media colleagues at the West Show all of 35 years ago was the inspiration for the title of Chris George’s new exhibition at Candie Museum.
After his initial suggestion of Finding Elvis was rejected – more on him later – he reflected on a conversation with former Channel Television reporter Roger Bowns in the beer tent at L’Eree.
‘That’s what your job’s all about Georgie,’ said Bowns. ‘Faces. F****** faces.’
When he half-jokingly suggested it to the museum, it was suitably edited and adopted.
There are a lot of faces around the walls of the museum. There are also plenty of Guernsey Press jobs – some of which we shared – and later snaps from his career. But it would be only ever so slightly biased if I said that the Press moments are among the best.
I’d only been at the Press three months when Chris arrived on the scene. I was the reporter on his first job. Within a week we’d done our first Nightmoves job together, in the Coal Hole of all places.
He’s a little shy to say it, so I will. Chris revolutionised photography at the Press. The legends that were Brian Green and John Brenton were known to everyone, particularly the emergency services, but Georgie, as he quickly became known to all, came into journalism at just the right time. Newspaper sales were growing, and the Press was evolving from the inside, along with the rest of the industry. Newspapers were becoming more like magazines – The Independent in the vanguard – and photography was driving that.
His eye for a great pic, and the ability to work with people to secure it, was second to none. And soon every reporter wanted Georgie on their jobs with them, not just because the finished piece would be likely to gain better prominence in the paper, but you’d likely have a right old laugh as well.
Georgie often turned the mundane into front page material – and it’s a template that today’s super-skilled Press photographers, Peter Frankland and Sophie Rabey, still follow.
We flick through the photos he submitted for the exhibition. The museum asked for 50. He gave them 70 and said ‘You choose’. And then he chucked in another 700 for good measure. He’d spent hours back at the Press earlier this year trawling 14 years of paper copy archives to find them all.
There are some of Percy Ferguson on the Fermain ferry. ‘I absolutely loved doing features like that, particularly now it’s disappeared, it has even more relevance.’
We jointly bemoan how ‘health and safety’ has stopped not only some great picture opportunities, but even access to some of the places he’d go to get great shots.
At the age of 12 Chris knew what he wanted to do for a living when he joined his local camera club. ‘I wasn’t sporty at all, nor really academic, and I latched on to this.’
At 17 he dropped out of sixth form to start work at an industrial, commercial and portrait photographer in his home town in Buckinghamshire, after his mum spotted an advert for the job and got him the interview. There he got his first taste of freelancing for local papers.
A friend’s mum came from Guernsey, and the two hatched plans to head over to the island for a year. Chris went after a photography job. He was told: ‘If you work for the Press you’ll end up taking all the great and the good of Guernsey.’
But the paper turned him down. However Grut’s snapped him up, and there he met wife-to-be Sally, who was running its wool department, and so he stayed.
He picked up a few jobs, the last one an overbearing job in photo processing, which he was about to quit when the managing editor of the Guernsey Press called him in 1988.
‘Why haven’t you applied for the photographer job we’ve advertised?’ he was asked.
‘Well you’ve rejected me twice already,’ he replied.
‘I suggest you reapply.’
He did and this time he was in, and on 3 January 1989 he was the new boy.
‘I was 31, passionate about photography and really wanted to make my mark. I wanted to get the front page every day.
‘My time at the Press made me realise my creative potential and I got a massive kick out of my pictures being used big and prominently.’
And up to when he moved on in 2003 – his replacement being Peter Frankland – he did just that, and has never stopped. And on these pages here’s a selection of some of Georgie’s best – some which you’ll see at Candie, and some which you might not.
And there will be more to follow in the paper over the next few weeks, while the exhibition runs up until Christmas.
Right, back to Elvis. Many will remember Elvis impersonator Brian Richards, who made such a thing of it he took over what had been The Apartment to strut his stuff on a regular basis. He also got a national TV appearance and colleague Peter Pannett suggested the idea of reprising the Kirsty MacColl’s 1981 hit There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis. Chris and Brian did so at the Arsenal Chippy in February 1998. But for ages on his trawl through the Press files, Chris just couldn’t find this picture. We’ll tell the full story, and many more about the Press days, at the ‘Museum After Hours’ talk that Chris and I are sharing on the evening of Thursday 16 October. Tickets can be booked here.
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