Photographer Sefton Samuels, who has died aged 93, was a consummate chronicler of life in the north of England. He has been variously described as the photographic equivalent of Ken Loach and the favourite photographer of painter LS Lowry. Over six decades he captured the great, the good, the gloom and the grime of the north-west.
Although Samuels was best known for his portraits of the reclusive Lowry, the footballer George Best, the playwright Alan Bennett and the singer Morrissey, his poignant observations of the realities of everyday life reveal his humanistic approach. He believed that “photojournalism is the most meaningful way to use a camera”, and his mix of portrait, street and documentary photography is reminiscent of the great Picture Post practitioners such as Bill Brandt.
Samuels was not given to photo essays and his best photographs are stand-alone, unique images: dirty children playing in the streets of Moss Side or jumping on mattresses in Kirkby, miners in St Helens, bingo players in Rawtenstall and the changing face of Manchester at the Caribbean carnival.
He was an amateur photographer until his mid-thirties, earning his living in the textile industry until two encounters led him to a full-time career in 1968. He possessed the qualities that every successful photographer needs: a knack for being in the right place at the right time and a dogged determination. Walking down Bridge Street in Manchester in May 1968, Samuels spotted Best, the Manchester United superstar, leaning against the door of his fashion boutique, soaking up the spring sunshine and the glory of winning the European Cup just two days earlier. Samuels approached him and asked if he could take a few photos, and George was only too happy to oblige: “I took what I thought were snapshots, but they turned out to be quite iconic.”
Ever since his student days, when he would take lunch at the Salford Art Gallery, Samuels had admired Lowry. He was determined to paint a portrait of the great painter. In September 1968, after years of writing to Lowry and sending prints of his work without response, Samuels travelled to Mottram-in-Longdendale, the village where Lowry lived, and tracked down his cleaner, Bessie Swindells. They got along well, both having worked in the factories, and she agreed to help.
When they finally met a few days later, Lowry was immediately drawn to Samuels, and enjoyed the fact that he was an amateur who had a real job in the textile industry. The photographer asked the painter what he liked to do best. Lowry replied, “I’ll show you, boy,” and sank into his favorite armchair with his feet up on the mantelpiece and began to fall asleep. Samuels recalled that it was probably his favorite picture. When he later returned to the painter’s house with some free prints, Lowry said, “These are the best portraits I ever had done, boy.”
Samuels’ work has been widely exhibited, including at Nine Photographers at the Manchester Building and Design Centre in 1963, featuring work by Shirley Baker, Ray Green and Neil Libbert; Sod Carnaby Street at the Proud Galleries, London in 2007; and When Football Was Football at the National Football Museum, Manchester in 2021. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A. In 2011 his book Northerners: Portrait of a No-Nonsense People was published, and he received the Royal Academy of Arts Eyewitness Award for his street photography.
The youngest child of Max Samuels, a butcher and grocer, and Leah (née Acker), Sefton was born in Manchester and grew up in Didsbury. At 15, he borrowed a small folding plate camera from his sister June and began taking photographs at school. He was hooked. To indulge his new passion, he cycled to his beloved Manchester City’s stadium at Maine Road, paid twopence to leave his bike in someone’s garden, then paid sixpence to enter the match, sneaking his camera in with him.
During his time at Manchester Grammar School, Samuels joined as many photographic societies as he could, but a career in photography seemed expensive and uncertain and out of reach. In 1947 he enrolled on a textiles course at Salford College of Technology, after which he went to Huddersfield Tech, where he trained as a chartered textile technologist. There Samuels achieved athletic distinction, winning the 120-yard hurdles in 1952, beating Derek Ibbotson, who later held the world mile record and won bronze in the 5,000 metres in 1956. For his first job, Samuels moved to Bradford, where he ran a weaving mill, but photography still had its hooks in him.
In August 1956 he traveled to London to see the groundbreaking exhibition Family of Man, which explored and depicted the universality of everyday human experience and included works by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange and August Sander. Inspired, Samuels threw himself into what he called “the realist school of social documentary.”
In November of that year he attempted to photograph fascist leader Oswald Mosley and his followers at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. Although warned not to photograph the crowd, he could not resist and a scuffle with Mosley’s “stewards” led to the police raiding and breaking up the meeting.
He documented the hard lives of his fellow Mancunians and their liberation at football matches, wrestling matches and in the jazz clubs he loved. He was himself a skilled semi-professional jazz drummer, and his intimacy with the scene helped him capture intense and dynamic performances.
In 1960 he won the Manchester Evening News amateur photography competition and the following year he moved back to his home town, where for a time he led a “dilettante, artistic life”. He began earning money as a freelancer for newspapers.
In the late 1960s, work in the textile industry disappeared and his success allowed him to become a professional photographer. He worked for Granada TV, shooting behind the scenes on Coronation Street, and then became the BBC’s man in the north.
In 1976 he launched the Sefton Photo Library, specialising in images of the North West and Yorkshire. The library grew and at its peak held the work of around 200 photographers, but the business was not for him and he sold it in the 1990s, returning to what he loved most: documenting the world and a particular corner of it.
He is survived by his third wife, Ann (née Chalkin, whom he married in 1995), two sons, Mark and Tim, from his first marriage in 1969 to Helen Baruck, who died in 1983, and two grandchildren.
• Sefton Samuel Samuels, photographer, born 27 January 1931; died 26 July 2024