BPH has just learnt of the passing of John Chillingworth yesterday, aged 97 years. As his website notes:
As a teenager, he made a traditional entry into Fleet Street at the height of the Second World War. His initial ambition had been to make the tea for the darkroom staff of the country's leading picture magazine, but he rapidly proved his worth and was embraced as one of the close-knit Picture Post 'family'. Returning to the magazine after three years as an army conscript, his natural ability as a photographer was recognised by Tom Hopkinson, the magazine's legendary editor. Influenced by the consummate skills of his mentor, Kurt Hutton, he developed a naturalistic style, which enabled him to work virtually unnoticed on many of his assignments.
During the following six years, working alongside the country's pioneer photographic journalists, Chillingworth gained invaluable experience as a much travelled staff photographer. Later, when a freelance, he was commissioned by newspapers and magazines, as well as serving major international advertising and industrial clients. Then, as the visual communication partner in an advertising consultancy, he added the written word to his bank of creative skills.
Getty Images' Hulton Archive holds four hundred picture essays from his days with Picture Post, which used narrative photography to inform, entertain and influence the conscience of its million-plus readers. The National Media Museum also holds his images in its extensive archive.
John worked for Picture Post from 1949-1956, joining aged 22 years, as one of its youngest photographers. He produced over 400 photo-essays for the magazine. After 1956, John continued to take photographs and to create picture stories on a freelance basis. He ran his own management consultancy from 1970s. I first met him in the 1990s when he came to Christie's and he used one of the original Leica or Contax cameras being auctioned of the type he'd used in the 1950s to do a new feature. We kept in touch.
He was and Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and was described in 1989 as 'one of the maker's of photographic history'.
As retrospective book was published by Dewi Lewis:
John Chillingworth. Picture Post Photographer
Introduction by Matthew Butson
Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2013
ISBN 978-1907893438
Book details here
John H Chillingworth, born 18 January 1928; died 6 April 2025, aged 97 years.
More to follow.
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