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The Brazda camp in Macedonia in 1999, which housed refugees from the Kosovo war.
The Brazda camp in Macedonia in 1999, which housed refugees from the Kosovo war. Photograph: John Reardon
The Brazda camp in Macedonia in 1999, which housed refugees from the Kosovo war. Photograph: John Reardon

John Reardon obituary

This article is more than 5 years old

Photographer and Observer picture editor whose work ranged from capturing the stark reality of war to the world of celebrity chefs

Readers of the Observer with an interest in foreign affairs will have been moved and mobilised by the harrowing photographs taken by John Reardon, who has died aged 66 of lung cancer. He was a veteran of some 14 wars, conflicts and natural disasters in the 1980s and 90s; his Nikon looked into the eyes of a child who had just undergone an amputation and exchanged gazes with a mortar-toting mujahid. He was with the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Tigrayans in Ethiopia, in Afghanistan in 1993 (earning an accolade from the World Press Photo awards) and Kosovo in 1997, and went from covering the intifada to the streets of New York after 9/11.

His was classic magazine work from the tail-end of the golden era of Sunday supplements. It was stark, yet stylish, appalling and appealing, and, above all, humane, which made the Observer Reardon’s natural home. It’s unusual for a photographer’s documentary work to have a unique flavour: Reardon’s did, and his mark was this plaintive humanity, almost a sentimentality, which he served with something acerbic, a squeeze of lemon to the eye.

John Reardon in 1995. He was a perfectionist – his images were always intended, never stolen. Photograph: Jane Bown/The Observer

As the century turned, and the Observer’s picture budget was redirected away from open-ended foreign forays into producing celebrity spectaculars, this, unexpectedly, also proved to be right up Reardon’s street: he enjoyably entombed Sir James Dyson in perspex underneath a carpet which was being cleaned by his most famous invention, while the feline José Mourinho was posed in a back alley amid a flurry of pigeons.

Reardon’s many portraits of chefs for the Observer Food Monthly, launched in 2001, were especially remarkable for their cheerful bravado. He tricked up Giorgio Locatelli, Phil Howard and Michel Roux in miniskirts, fishnets and man-sized stilettoes for a piece about sexism in the kitchen. Fergus Henderson, of meaty St John, was hooked up and suspended by his feet, swaying around next to a mildly suppurating pig’s carcass. Reardon chided and chivvied 12 Michelin-starred chefs to ape Leonardo’s The Last Supper; Gordon Ramsay was Christ and a whole brie, hurled by Marcus Wareing, was his halo. The picture was subsequently purchased by the National Portrait Gallery and it is revealing that the biggest ego in the room was the photographer’s.

Raymond Blanc at his restaurant in Great Milton, Oxfordshire, in 2002. Photograph: John Reardon/The Observer

Because accompanying Reardon’s brilliance came a considerable side-order of spikiness. “If he caught you not concentrating,” said the subject of one of his portraits, “he would be brutal, but he would get the picture.” To the exasperation of his ever-diminishing group of allies and advocates, falling foul of the higher-ups often seemed to be Reardon’s explicit purpose in life.

He perhaps inherited his contrariness from his father, Jack Reardon – a truculent Yorkshireman who went from the RAF to the oil business – and his rebelliousness and social conscience from his mother, Vincie (nee Klein), a South African teacher who had taken part in the Black Sash white women’s resistance in Cape Town, the city where John was born, one of four children, and grew up.

He was sent to boarding school in Warwick in 1966 to avoid conscription. He was capped five times in the England under-19 rugby team in 1970, and the deftness that brought him sporting prowess is apparent in his photographic work: peerless shutter-finger-to-eye co-ordination that helped him capture a thousand moments just so.

Observer Food Monthly cover with Marco Pierre White in 2001. Photograph: John Reardon/OFM

He began an engineering degree at Birmingham University, but dropped out and enrolled on a photography course at the local poly – a decision his father could not accept. They did not speak for a decade. And what a decade it was: he fell in (and frequently out) with the graphic designer Brian Homer and former Birmingham Post man Derek Bishton who were running a monthly listings magazine, Grapevine.

They set up a landmark photographic project, Handsworth Self Portrait, where locals were invited (in English, Punjabi and Urdu) to pose in a makeshift studio and click the shutter themselves by means of a long extension cable. In 1984, Bishton and Reardon collaborated on a book about Handsworth, Home Front, with an introduction by Salman Rushdie.

During this period, Reardon recycled many clapped-out VW camper vans and Beetles, went to Baltimore and married an American woman, then returned to Britain, and made lengthy trips to Norfolk, where his brother Keith had settled. Its remoteness struck a chord with Reardon, and he was seldom happier in later life than being there among his rambling extended family in the dogdays of summer.

With Homer and Bishton’s encouragement, Reardon moved to London in the mid-80s, doing assignments set up by the Katz picture agency. The tremendous work he had hinted he was capable of followed in a rush: few people ever looked better, braver, more desolate or more joyful than in front of his generous lens, Reardon staring down on them from his rakish 6ft 3in height. Later he was invited to join Magnum, the apogee of respect for a photojournalist, by the remarkable Iranian photographer Abbas. Reardon refused: his portfolio, he said, simply wasn’t good enough.

He was rarely content with the quality of his photographs. He would simply run out of time or light to take a better shot. Or, rather, “make” a better one. The distinction, which he insisted on, was not so much pretentious as ambitious: his images were always intended, never stolen.

Portrait of the actor Siân Phillips. Photograph: John Reardon/The Observer

A photograph he took in Bangladesh in 1993 profoundly changed the course of his life. It was of a small, dead boy, roughly the same age as Alexander, Reardon’s young son from an earlier relationship with Dominique Carpenter. At the first opportunity, he took a desk job in order to spend more time at home. Painfully ill-disposed to office life, he hired a talented young woman to help: Sacha Lehrfreund, with whom he was to spend the rest of his life and, in his dying weeks, to marry.

The office job – deputy picture editor of the Observer, then editor – could not possibly last and in 1995 Reardon did go back on the road. One last adventure was photographing the stallions and racehorses of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum of Dubai, which started as a one-off commission for two-dozen black-and-white portraits and lasted 16 years. It took him to Australia, Japan and America for weeks at a time, making devoted friends and hacking people off in equal measure.

He belittled these efforts as “just commercial”, but he went about them with his usual mix of tireless and tiresome exactitude that would both delight and exhaust. Then, his fatal flaw: one lecture too many to the higher-ups, and he was out.

Few he encountered were neutral about Reardon the man. Harder, though, to quibble with the work.

He is survived by Sacha and Alexander, his mother and his siblings, Vincie-Ann, Keith and Robert.

John Reardon, photographer, born 4 November 1951; died 21 April 2018

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