Eamonn McCabe, award-winning photographer who made his name in the world of sport before becoming a renowned portraitist and picture editor – obituary

Eamonn McCabe, who has died aged 74, had the most distinctive style of any sports photographer of his heyday in the late 1970s and early 1980s; subsequently, he became an influential picture editor of his newspaper, the Guardian, for more than a decade, before forging a third career as a portrait photographer, notably of those in the arts.

McCabe’s images had their own recognisable, often quirky way of looking at sport. In the time-honoured words of the advice given to young “snappers”, the photographs told a story. Frequently, McCabe came at an occasion from an unexpected angle, his focus not so much the sporting action as the bigger picture.

Working in black and white, he captured the duels at Wimbledon between the het-up John McEnroe and the imperturbable Bjorn Borg, and those on Moscow’s Olympic track between Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe. Other celebrated images included Brendan Foster running in the rain and Liverpool’s Phil Thompson and Phil Neal celebrating winning the European Cup in 1981.

Humour was never far away, as in the shot of the bald Bristol City goalkeeper kicking what resembled his own head, or the yawning woman captured at Ladies’ Day at Ascot. Arguably his two best-known photographs were of the impossibly high toss of the table tennis player Li Zhenshi, and of the boxer Sylvester Mittee taping his crisply focused hands before a sparring session.

Often accompanying the writer Hugh McIlvanney, McCabe, who was voted sports photographer of the year four times between 1979 and 1984, covered three Olympics, two World Cups, and the Boat Race in which Cambridge sank.

He revelled in the glamour of such events, before air travel was more widespread and when even foreign football teams seemed exotic. In 1985, however, he witnessed the Heysel Stadium disaster in Belgium, where 39 fans were killed following rioting at the European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus.

McCabe was taking photographs of the agitated Italian fans when the wall against which they had been pressed collapsed. He was always haunted by what he saw. “I arrived as a sports photographer,” he said, “and I left as a news photographer.”

His pictures of that night won him the News Photographer of the Year award. Those of the match itself he never bothered to develop: “They didn’t seem to be very important.”

The elder of two children, Eamonn Patrick McCabe was born in Highgate, North London, on July 28 1948. His parents, who were Irish, had met when Celia, his mother, was working on the desk at the Hotel Russell in Bloomsbury and James, his father, was a taxi driver.

They subsequently became the successful proprietors of a hotel themselves and Eamonn was sent to an independent school, Challoner’s, in North Finchley. He was not much engaged by his studies, but he was taken with the mood and the music of the 1960s and headed for San Francisco. There he enrolled in film school but decided to return to Britain when he became liable to be drafted for the Vietnam War.

Music remained an early interest – he was a drummer in a friend’s band – and, largely via trial and error, he began to photograph concerts. It was a shot he captured of Pete Townshend in mid-leap at The Who’s gig at Leeds University in 1970 that made him want to pursue a career with the camera. The advent of Gary Glitter and his ilk diminished his enthusiasm for the music scene.

One Saturday, while working for a photo agency, he was sent to cover a Tottenham Hotspur match, being a fan of the club. “I got a decent picture of a rare Martin Chivers goal which was published in a couple of the Sunday papers the next day,” he recalled. “I was hooked. The excitement in photography was back.”

A rugby match between Saracens and London Welsh gave him another break. “The Daily Telegraph used one on the Monday and I got another taste of the big time. I wanted more.” He took a chance by hiring a small darkroom in St Pancras to be closer to Fleet Street and began to take on the agencies.

Speed was of the essence. He would rush back from matches at White Hart Lane or Highbury in his Renault 4 van, processing the pictures as he went. “I used meths to dry the films and then hung them out of the window while screaming down Caledonian Road.” He gained a reputation for providing “filler” pictures for the first editions of the papers. He was taken on as a staff photographer by The Observer in 1976.

After Heysel, McCabe turned away from sport, in part because there was becoming less emphasis on longer feature pieces. He worked as picture editor of Sportsweek, owned by Robert Maxwell, but when this folded he went in the same role in 1988 to The Guardian.

At the time, the newly founded Independent had won over many Guardian readers with its innovative use of photographs to illustrate news stories. Over the next 13 years, McCabe did much the same as the paper moved to a more contemporary design and format, for instance with the advent of its G2 section. Cool-headed in a crisis, McCabe was awarded the accolade of picture editor of the year a record six times during the 1990s.

With what he called the “cult of personality” on the rise in the news, McCabe reinvented himself after 2001 as a portraitist, often for Guardian profiles, working with deft swiftness and embracing colour.

He took a much-admired series of photographs of writers’ rooms, and of painters in their studio, as well as studies of the likes of Lou Reed, Lemmy and Iris Murdoch with her husband John Bayley. McCabe also did more than two dozen photographs for the National Portrait Gallery, including one of the Telegraph’s cartoonist Matt Pritchett.

McCabe, who presented several series on the history of photography on radio and television, thought the impact of an image depended not on its being Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment in time but on the emotions it triggered.

“You make your own luck,” he said of his own success, although he was known for his kind-hearted help of many younger journalists making their way. He settled in Suffolk, enjoying golf and growing tomatoes on his allotment. He was a recent devotee of the Telegraph crossword.

Eamonn McCabe’s first marriage, from 1972 to 1993, to Ruth Calvert, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, the former Guardian journalist Rebecca Smithers, to whom he was married in 1997, by their daughter, and by the son of his first marriage.

Eamonn McCabe, born July 28 1948, died October 2 2022