Words may give newspapers their voice, but pictures provide their soul. Eamonn McCabe, who died suddenly last Sunday, aged 74, was crucial in creating that authentic emotional spirit in the Observer and the Guardian for more than 40 years. He was that rare thing: an instinctive newspaper photographer whose work to daily and weekly deadlines was timeless enough to hang on gallery walls.
Most of us never master one creative discipline. Eamonn made himself a peerless practitioner of three: sports photographer, editor, portraitist. London-born, he first felt a sense of his vocation during the California summer of love, when he picked up a camera on a film course in San Francisco. He subsequently made his name on the back pages of this paper in a golden decade that began with a contract in 1976, and which earned him four sports photographer of the year awards.
