Phil Penman: A Life in Photographs

PP: I was basically a failed academic. That was my entry point.

My dad was a photographer, so photography was always around me, but originally I wanted to be a sports teacher. I struggled badly at school. I was dyslexic, although nobody really diagnosed it that way then. They just pulled you out of the regular classroom and put you somewhere else.

Then I discovered sport. I was good at it, and suddenly I had something that gave me confidence. I thought I would become a sports teacher.

My dad told me I needed a backup subject. He gave me a little test: go through the local newspaper and choose what I thought was the best photograph. If he agreed with my choice, he'd give me a camera.

I remember the photograph. It wasn't particularly good. It was a cheque presentation but it was the best photograph in the paper.

Apparently I chose correctly because he bought me a Nikkormat.

Then I studied photography and sports. I got an F in sports studies and an A in photography.

That pretty much settled it.

PP: Photography made sense to me.

At school, I never felt particularly good at anything except sport. Photography was different. It gave me another way of communicating and another way of looking at things.

I went to Weymouth College in Dorset and then Berkshire College of Art and Design. I was fortunate because I had teachers who really believed in me.

One of them, Andy Fowler, championed me as a photographer. I remember submitting my first project and him telling me, “This is probably the best picture I've ever had submitted on a first project.”

When somebody believes in you at that age, it can completely change you.

There was also another photographer, Paul, who took me out as his assistant while I was still at college. You learn enormously from experiences like that. Somebody is trusting you enough to bring you into the real world and show you how the profession actually works.

I've never forgotten that.

PP: I desperately wanted to come to America.

I had an aunt and uncle in Yonkers, and I'd already fallen in love with New York. I applied for a visa and was rejected three times. I finally got it on the fourth attempt.

I came over and lived with my aunt and uncle, but photography wasn't happening. I ended up answering phones in a real-estate office. After about three months, I realized this wasn't going anywhere.

So I went back to England with my tail between my legs.

I was back in Dorchester, living with my parents. I worked briefly as a waiter. Even my dad was looking at me thinking, “Your life can't end up like this.”

Then a job opened at a local newspaper near Reading. I applied and got it.

Suddenly I was a newspaper photographer.

From there I went to a large news agency working for the national newspapers. I photographed everything. News, corporate work, whatever came through the door.

Then one of those chance encounters happened that can change your entire life.

I met a photographer called Kerry Davies. He knew people at Splash, the news agency in Los Angeles, and told me I should call them.

I did.

A few weeks later I was flying to Los Angeles.

I remember them telling me during the interview, “You'll be flying everywhere. You'll be shooting from helicopters.”

You think people are exaggerating when they tell you things like that.

Then one of my first assignments was at Santa Monica Airport. They put me into a Robinson helicopter with the doors off. I had a seat belt on and was absolutely terrified that I was going to fall out.

That was my welcome to America.

But I'd finally got where I'd always wanted to be.

PP: Around 2000.

New York was always where I wanted to be.

It is incredibly competitive because you're not simply competing with photographers from New York or America. People come here from everywhere. Some of the most talented and ambitious people in the world end up in this city.

That can be unhealthy because nobody stops. I honestly can't remember the last time I had a real vacation where I completely switched off.

But you also feed off that energy.

And America gave me opportunities I don't think I would have had if I'd stayed in England.

PP: Completely different.

I was working for an agency that was primarily known for celebrity photography. That was the bread and butter. But I also did investigative work and news.

I've probably worked in almost every genre of photography at some point.

There was celebrity work, investigative assignments, portraits, breaking news. I worked on the Jeffrey Epstein story. I did assignments tracking people down. It was a very intense world.

Financially, photography was also very different then. A single news or celebrity photograph could generate extraordinary amounts of money.

But the lifestyle was brutal.

You were constantly traveling. You didn't really have a personal life. Relationships suffered. People burned out.

Eventually I realized I couldn't keep doing it.

PP: By far.

Nothing else comes close.

And every year you relive it.

For many years I didn't really talk in detail about individual photographs from that day. More recently I've started telling some of those stories, explaining the circumstances around particular images and my connection to the people in them.

The response has been extraordinary. Millions of people have seen those stories online.

But for me they aren't simply photographs from a historical event.

They're attached to memories.

They're attached to people.

They're attached to what happened around you that day.

Even now there are things I can't watch. If I'm watching something and suddenly footage appears of the plane going into the building, I sometimes have to turn it off.

PP: Absolutely.

A lot of my friends were working that day. We all knew each other. Mario Tama, Spencer Platt, Stan Honda many of us were out there photographing.

Stan and I were probably about twenty feet apart when we photographed the same businessman walking through the debris.

When I see certain photographs, I'm immediately back there.

People forget that photographers aren't somehow outside an event simply because they're holding cameras. You're experiencing it as well.

I remember trying to get word to my family that I was okay because nobody could get through. I finally managed to get a friend to contact my parents.

There was so much uncertainty. Nobody knew what was happening or what was coming next.

That's part of what stays with you.

PP: I bought my first Leica around 2004, an M7.

At the time I was still doing celebrity work, but while I was walking around New York looking for celebrities, I started photographing ordinary people on the street.

Gradually, those photographs became much more interesting to me than the photographs I was being paid to make.

That was the beginning.

Then in 2015 I had a show at the Leica Gallery in New York, and that became a turning point. I realized I was entering another stage of my career.

I couldn't keep doing the celebrity and investigative work. It was killing me.

So I made a very deliberate decision: if I was going to continue with photography, I wanted to make my photographs.

That was a huge change.

For a while I took a job outside photography. I was working for a cycling company and developing its business in the Northeast. At the same time, I was building my street photography.

Then around 2018 or 2019 I left that job and published my first book.

After that, things really started moving.

PP: Completely.

For most of my professional career, every picture had a purpose. You took a celebrity photograph because somebody wanted that celebrity photograph. You photographed something because the newspaper or agency needed it.

My dad came from that old-school mentality: you take photographs to make money. Every photograph should generate income.

But photography itself isn't about making money.

It's about making pictures.

If you can build a life around that, fantastic.

Today I don't work for clients. I can take the photographs I want to take.

That's incredibly rare.

It took a long time to get there.

PP: Absolutely.

The camera is just a tool.

Especially in news and street photography, what matters is how you interact with people.

Can you read somebody?

Can you approach somebody?

Can you make them comfortable?

Can you recognize when you shouldn't photograph?

Your body language matters. How you treat people matters.

When I started in newspapers, we sometimes had to do what were called “death knocks.” Somebody might have lost a family member only hours earlier, and you had to knock on their door and ask whether they would give the newspaper a photograph.

You learned very quickly about respect.

You learned how to talk to people.

Those experiences stay with you.

Technology has changed photography enormously, but I worry sometimes that we've lost some of that human interaction. People communicate through screens and messages rather than face-to-face.

But photography is still about people.

You have to know how to communicate.

PP: You can't just take pictures anymore.

You may have to shoot video, conduct interviews, understand social media, understand marketing, build an audience, give talks, publish books.

But there's an important distinction: you don't simply need followers. You need relationships.

I've tried to build an audience of people who genuinely support the work.

I respond to people. I respond to comments. I answer messages whenever I can.

Over time, you build a community.

And you see the effect when you release a book or have an exhibition or announce an event and people actually show up.

That doesn't happen accidentally.

PP: You have to separate the two.

The work has to come first.

You have to make photographs that mean something to you.

But if you want photography to support your life, you also have to understand how the world works.

At one point I broke my hip after a dog ran in front of me while I was cycling. I was stuck in my apartment on crutches, and I used that time to completely rethink things.

I rebuilt my website. I learned about social media. I studied marketing. I listened to people who understood business and tried to apply what made sense to photography.

You still need the work. Marketing can't turn bad photographs into great photographs.

But great photographs nobody sees aren't going to build a career either.

PP: I'm working on my sixth now, and at the moment I'm producing roughly one a year.

My first book was a huge gamble.

I refinanced my house to make it.

That's how committed I was.

And it became an incredibly difficult experience. There were legal problems and eventually a lawsuit that lasted about two years. Thankfully, Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts in New York helped me enormously.

I learned a tremendous amount from it.

Now when photographers tell me they want to make a book, I try to be very open about the realities. Everybody wants a photography book, but they often don't understand what they're getting into.

You have to ask: Who is going to buy it? How will you distribute it? Do you already have an audience? What does the agreement actually say?

A book is wonderful, but it's also a business.

Fortunately, after that first experience I got a publishing deal, so I didn't have to finance the books myself anymore.

New York Street Diaries really took off, and the books since then have continued to do well.

Now I have a great team around me—a curator I've worked with for years, Lou Proud, and Anya, the designer. Having the right people around you makes an enormous difference.

PP: Tokyo.

It's called Tokyo Street Diaries.

Tokyo has become my new love affair over the last five years.

I go there toward the end of every year, and it's something I look forward to enormously. The city, the lifestyle, the visual language it all fits me.

I'm there photographing, but I'm also teaching. I run workshops in Tokyo and around the world.

So Tokyo has gradually become another chapter of the work.

PP: Definitely.

We're completely saturated.

Social media means we're seeing an endless stream of images. There are still great photographers working today, absolutely, but the sheer volume makes it harder for the really good work to rise above everything else.

I actually find myself looking outside photography more and more.

I go to MoMA almost every week.

I'll walk around and look at paintings, sculpture, whatever exhibition happens to be there.

That's where I find inspiration now.

Sometimes looking at another photographer can influence you too directly. You start unconsciously absorbing somebody else's language.

Looking at painting or other forms of art can open something different.

New York is extraordinary for that. We have all of this on our doorstep.

PP: Exactly. I've somehow come full circle.

I wanted to be a sports teacher, and now I'm a photography teacher.

I started teaching workshops for the Leica Academy around 2015. My friend John Kreidler asked me to teach people how I actually worked.

The first workshop was insane. We were starting at five in the morning and finishing around eleven at night.

Eventually we realized people might enjoy it more if we let them sleep a little.

But I discovered that I really loved teaching.

Today I teach for the Leica Akademie and also run my own workshops around the world. I'm traveling probably half the year.

PP: Honesty.

I don't want somebody to pay me and leave without learning anything.

I'm very open about how the profession works—the good parts and the terrible parts.

Sometimes people come up after a talk and say, “Thank you for being honest.”

And I always think: what else am I supposed to be?

If somebody asks me how this career works, I'm going to tell them.

It's not all exhibitions and books and traveling around the world.

A lot of it sucks.

You get rejected.

You get beaten down.

You work incredibly hard and nothing happens.

Then something happens.

And you keep going.

I was fortunate enough to have teachers who helped me, so I feel some responsibility to do the same thing for somebody else.

Sometimes all a young photographer needs is one person to say, “There's something here. Keep going.”

PP: That's difficult.

You see exhibitions sometimes where the subject is very fashionable at that particular moment. Somebody has understood what's going to attract attention and built a show around it.

But tapping into a subject doesn't automatically make the photographs good.

The question is: can the work survive beyond that moment?

Can you keep evolving?

If you want a career that lasts decades, you can't keep repeating the same thing forever.

You have to change.

You have to stay curious.

I can't really judge whether my own books are good. All I can do is put out the strongest work I can make—the photographs that inspire me—and hope people connect with them.

PP: I've always been fairly good at knowing when to pivot.

The photography business changes constantly.

If you're not willing to adapt, eventually the business changes without you.

I've been doing this for a long time and I've worked in a lot of different genres. At certain moments I could see something changing and think, “I need to move now.”

If you move too late, you get trapped.

But the important thing is that eventually I figured out how to pivot toward the photography I actually wanted to make.

That's the difference.

For years I was making photographs primarily to earn a living.

Now I've built a career around the photographs I want to make.

PP: Not really.

There are moments.

Getting my work into the Library of Congress in 2022 was one of them. You have these little timestamps where you think, “Okay, this is actually happening.”

But I don't dwell on them.

I'm always thinking, “Right, that's done. What's next?”

That's probably not healthy because you don't always enjoy the moment as much as you should.

But I enjoy traveling. I enjoy being able to photograph what I want. I enjoy teaching.

The last nine years have really been about building the life I want to live.

And when you think about it, being able to do that is completely insane.

I don't work for clients anymore.

I travel.

I make my own photographs.

I publish books.

I teach photography.

And somehow I make a living doing it.

That's incredibly rare, and I know how fortunate I am.

PP: Having a successful photography business today is as much about marketing as it is about photography.

There are many good photographers out there, but not many know how to market their work to an audience. Anyone can buy a ton of followers, but that doesn't translate to having a loyal audience who will support you and invest in your work.

Back in the day, I learned from YouTube videos featuring the likes of Chris Do (The Futur), Seth Godin, Gary Vee, and Rory Sutherland. Now, we have endless free videos to learn from.

PP: Go out and shoot.

And enjoy it.

Find something you're passionate about and chase it because life's way too bloody short to spend it doing something you don't want to do.

And put in the work.

Nobody is going to give you anything. There's no substitute for doing the work.

But you also have to work smart.

Everybody gets the same twenty-four hours. You can try to outwork everybody else, but at some point you also have to understand where to put your energy.

Learn.

Adapt.

Build relationships.

Be open to changing direction.

And keep taking pictures.

If a dyslexic kid like me who was pulled out of class and made to feel like he wasn't going to amount to anything can build a life doing this, then other people can too.

PP: Several lives, definitely.

I've done so many different things in photography that sometimes it feels like I've had multiple careers.

But somehow they all connect.

Every experience taught me something. Every person I met led somewhere. Even the things that seemed terrible at the time ended up pushing me in another direction.

So my long-term plan is pretty simple.

Keep going.

It's worked out pretty well so far.