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Katrina Manson

Katrina Manson, 28, came to photography late, having had ambitions from girlhood to be a journalist which led her, via internships at The Sunday Times and Reuters, to a degree in history and politics at Oxford. She was in Burkina Faso, compiling the first guidebook to the country for Bradt, when she realised that photography would take centre stage in her life, as she explains to David Land

“I went to Burkina Faso as a guide book writer”, says Katrina Manson, “but then the guide book needed photos, and I realised that I would have to take them. The more I had the camera round my neck, the more I loved it, and I was soon taking photos which weren’t for the guidebook as well. I covered the presidential inauguration for Reuters, which was an overwhelming experience – it took place in a national football stadium packed with people all wearing the same colour, going wild with flags. I’m pretty little, so I’d be fighting and running and not being able to breathe in these huge groups, and it was thrilling. People were terribly nice to me because I was a little white girl - and the smile – I smiled my head off! - I was feeling so alive with the moment of trying to get this photo that no one seemed to want you take. That was the most thrilling thing I’d done. It was electric.

Origins

“Every single wall in my parents’ house is full of framed photos - and my best friend’s father had a darkroom, and we used to hang out there at the weekends. He had a photography shop as well, so what with one thing and another, I was always around the idea that photographs were exciting, and a little bit mysterious.

“I had an old second hand SLR, and it would always jam and have to be stuck into the repair shop. It was a good way of learning the basic rules, whereas with digital you might not even notice what the fundamental ideas are and how a photo works, so I still draw on that today.

“I attended St Paul’s, a private girls’ school in Hammersmith. It was quite academic. I loved studying, and it had a photography club, which I joined – not that I thought that was what I’d end up doing back then. I’d hang out in the darkroom, trying to figure out what on earth ISO and all those things meant, and go off at weekends and take photos of the river down at Richmond.

“My family has a custom-built furniture firm, so the influence to go into journalism didn’t come from them. They’re artistic design people, so I think that journalism came from a combination of academic study and asking questions - I noticed that I always did that, and it seemed that journalists did too!

The Sunday Times

“I did work experience at The Sunday Times from when I was 14 until after I left university. It was really stretching. To be in a newsroom with mostly middle-aged, chain-smoking men, who worked solidly and so hard … there’s such competition to get your story into those pages, even to get your name … any scrap of recognition is really counted on. At 14, it’s like walking into the world of Superman. The more you get set a task, and have to go and research that question that no one knows the answer to and come back and have found the answer, the more you think, ‘Give me another one’.

“Often, they’d try to get you working on different aspects of a much broader story, so maybe you’d have to ring up MPs, or find out who earns what throughout the country. You’re really piecing together a jigsaw, in which you don’t quite know how your piece fits into the story, but you know it counts.

“I was the photo ferrier girl for ages. This was back in the days when there was a photo library, and I’d have to take the photos backwards and forwards from the library to the picture desk. This was prior to Quark Xpress and Macs – they were still doing designs on paper. It’s like having seen a piece of old Fleet Street. Part of me has this tiny memory of a really old man! - so when hacks get together and talk about it, I nearly know what they might be talking about.

Reuters

“I had a work placement at Reuters when I was 17, straight after my GCSEs – and then I went back again in my gap year. I was in a strange department called Editorial Polling, which is where people ring up and ask things like, ‘Do you think interest rates are going to go down?’, and, ‘Unemployment figures are coming out, what do you think they’ll be?’. Through that, I got put on various other news desks, and started writing a little bit, so that was probably when I got my first by-line.

“News reporting felt so tough: you just slice it from the bottom up. The Reuters style was described to me as if you had just run for a bus and you’ve got to yell someone the story: you start with the most important thing and you can chop off from the bottom, which is so different from feature writing, where the way it ends matters just as much as the beginning and the middle.

Oxford

“I went to Oxford to read modern history, but I’d been to Kenya in my gap year as a volunteer teacher, and I’d become intrigued and wanted to study Africa further, so I switched my degree to history and politics. You have to follow your passion and see how it develops.

“After graduation, I went to do work experience at The Sunday Times, doing photocopying and helping to make the maps in the Travel section. I ended up staying on, and became the news reporter on the Travel News page, which carried stories like: ‘There’s been an earthquake in such and such a place. What should you do?’ That was real on-the-job training: what makes a story, and what allows it to last the distance of an entire week and still count as something new that people want to read about on a Sunday.

“It was great overhearing all these conversations in the Editorial department: the turf that everyone’s defending, and the vision that everyone’s sharing … suggesting ideas and having them knocked back and thinking, ‘Why doesn’t my idea work? Ok, I’ll think of another one …’ I was surrounded by travel books, and fell in love with Bradt Travel Guides because of their quality and the level of research and detail that goes into them.

“I wrote to Bradt saying, ‘Hello, I’m a travel news reporter. I’ve travelled in Africa and I love your books’. It was looking for authors for Indonesia and Burkina Faso. I’d learned all of the capitals of the world when I was eight or nine. There were four capitals that I loved, and one of them was Ouagadougou, which is the captial of the West African country which was then called Upper Volta and is now known as Burkina Faso. So I suddenly I was fulfilling a girlhood dream and being offered the chance to go to Ouagadougou!

“Together with James Knight, who was also a Sunday Times journalist, I went to Burkina Faso to write the first guidebook to the country. It was fascinating, and we ended up staying for a year instead of the allotted six months. Burkina Faso is the second bottom on the UN human development list, with huge poverty and not that much development potential. It’s a landlocked tough old country, where people are working really hard all the time with their farming – it’s the biggest cotton producer in Africa.

“Guidebooks don’t pay well. You sign a contract, get an advance, and once the book comes out two years later, you get royalties. Your advance is deducted from your royalties, and then you get a royalty cheque every six months. I worked out that, especially writing it with two people, it’s not enough to cover the airfare, so you do it for the passion and for the positive contribution you can make.

“After Burkina Faso, we did some work for Fodor’s Travel Guides, updating guides to Morocco and London, before moving onto Sierra Leone in West Africa, to produce the first travel guide to that country, once again for Bradt, which we’re just finishing off now.

Cameras

“James had been on The Sunday Times Technology section, and had a good relationship with Pentax, so before we left The Sunday Times, we approached it and were given an *ist DSLR to go away with. Neither of us had a clue how to use it, and it stayed in its case for a long time because we were too afraid to touch it. It was eventually broken out of its box, and we started trying it out on auto. Then I began remembering the stuff I’d learned as a kid, and things got really exciting.

“I began to teach myself technique, saying that certain days were ‘external flash days’, or ‘aperture days’, during which I’d experiment with that element of technique in depth. On ‘tripod days’, I’d think of things to shoot with a tripod, thereby learning that having something so heavy and cumbersome when you meet people is actually one of the ways of breaking down barriers. It makes the process slower and more formal.

Katrina is now a Brand Ambassador for Pentax, and her *ist was updated with a K10D. The morning I met her, she was taking delivery of Pentax’s 14MP K20D. “The K10D has coped superbly with vagaries of shooting in Africa”, she says, “and I’m looking forward to putting the K20D through its paces. It looks to be as rugged and user friendly as its predecessor, only with a higher resolution chip and a larger 3ins LCD – which will come in very handy. I can’t wait.

“3MB is the largest file size I need to shoot most of the time, so if I don’t need to shoot Raw, I won’t. When I’m shooting for Reuters, speed is of the essence, so it only wants files of 0.7MB uploaded. Sometimes I take an internet modem out with me, because you have to get stuff out so quickly.

“The K10D, as the K20D, has a handy Raw button, enabling you to switch instantly from shooting Jpegs to Raw + Jpeg, so when I’m feeling that I may be about to take an exceptional photo, I’ll put it on Raw as well. Shooting for Reuters is challenging because, for reasons of editorial integrity, you’re not allowed to make any changes to your photographs, whereas when you’re shooting travel, you tend to touch things up a bit.

Building relationships

“Particularly in Sierra Leone, you can’t just take a picture of a stranger: you have to build a relationship, so that they know you’re taking a photo for the right reasons. There are two big complaints that I hear. One is that you are taking photos of people to show them to your friends and laugh because they’re so poor. The other is that you’re taking photos to make loads of money.

“I did a shoot recently in a market place; they’re notoriously difficult to photograph and people get it wrong all the time. They start shooting that woman with the tomatoes, hoping no one will realise they’re taking it. But people always do notice, and it’s disrespectful. I learnt that the marketplace has a chairlady who could say yes for everyone. She explained that I was taking photos of foodstuffs to show rising prices - and my goodness! - the roof of the market took off, with everyone complaining about the prices, and they couldn’t wait to be photographed.

“All the stories I do now, the thing that brings them to life is the photo. I have worked with photographers, and it’s good fun, but there’s something about having that conversation with yourself as to how the photograph and the words will work together. It doesn’t feel quite right now going without either my camera or my notebook. They’ve become partners to each other.

“I love home and family and London, but I also love doing what I’m doing. When you’re driven by that much passion, it isn’t really that hard to make a choice. There are no international journalists based in Sierra Leone, and I feel it’s worth doing because I’m covering stories which otherwise just wouldn’t get out.”