Ian Allen: From darkroom to award-winning star of photojournalism

Ian Allen does not look a day older than the 37 years he has spent at The Gleaner Company, beginning as a photography clerk filing negatives in the library, before processing them in the era of black and white and later into a world of colour millions of flashes later.

Allen,55, has worked with five editors-in-chief – from Dudley Stokes to Kaymar Jordan, who spent her final day in office on Tuesday.

Known as the de facto Children’s Own Spelling Bee photographer, he has traversed Jamaica’s hinterlands, finding schools and their spellers for the long-running Gleaner competition. He has covered thousands of assignments, staying sometimes for days on the road; covered the mundane and the exciting; bumped into the unintentional and come away with the exceptional; laughed and cried after taking shots, but is forever scarred by crime-scene photos.

As he told The Gleaner, being the rookie photographer, you get the worst camera at the time, and when called to a crime scene years ago on Dyke Road, he had to go close to the subject of the assignment.

“It was a decomposing body of a man who disappeared and his body was found about four days later. Because of the lenses on the camera, I had to go close to the scene. The sight of the body and the smell is what I always remember. And while there, the police received a call that there was another body farther away from the scene,” the veteran said.

Crime scenes, he said, are the worst he has covered.

“Even for a seasoned photographer, they can overwhelm you,” he explained.

But that labour of love - and excellence - bore fruit on Monday, when he received the Badge of Honour for Meritorious Service.

Allen began his career at The Gleaner months after leaving Papine High School. He started working in the library as a researcher, filing photos and negatives, and was also tasked with cutting stories from six newspapers daily for archiving.

No one has ever seen him cut them, he said, as, in order to learn his craft, he came two hours early to learn and perfect the task. His official work hours were 8 a.m.-4 p.m., but he came in at 6, he said.

Allen has a humorous recollection of departmental intrigue when there was talk that the negative for the famous photo of late Wailer, Peter Tosh, holding his guitar in the shape of an M-16 assault rifle, had been stolen.

While doing routine filing, he recalls discovering the negative and proudly announcing that he had found it.

“Well, you know, no sooner than I found it, less than a week after, somebody really stole it. It was never found again,” he said.

After getting the green light for a transfer to the photography department, Allen operated a machine that produced bromide for pasting on pages.

There he brushed shoulders with now-late greats Junior Dowie and Winston Sill.

He described Sill as the “master and the best black-and-white photo developer ever”. Within months, Allen was ahead of the curve, developing negatives.

Allen was assigned photographer for the long-running STAR one-year-old babies until the feature was discontinued years later.

He remained in the dark room until 1999 when The Gleaner Company changed the press to colour.

One of the hazards of photojournalism is interfacing with law enforcement.

He recalled being among several photographers at the Norman Manley International Airport seeing Jamaica’s Reggae Boyz off to France after their historic World Cup qualification.

CHARGES DROPPED

He was taking pictures as each player disembarked, but noticed a car parked nearby. Photographers were shooting over the car. A policeman with his baton on his wrist stood to his left. He was reportedly standing so close that the dangling baton was hitting him on his leg. Allen said that he pointed it out to the policeman on three occasions, but was ignored.

“I turned around and told him to stop it,” Allen recalled.

A brawl ensued and the photographer was slapped with five charges, including assault and resisting arrest.

The charges were later dropped.

“Funny enough, the policemen and I became friends,” Allen quipped, adding that he was later facilitated to snap exclusive photos of a US ambassador.

The experience of covering the 2010 earthquake in Haiti remains etched in his mind. The broken bodies, destroyed lives, the wounded, the distress, as well as how a three-day trip dragged into a nightmarish seven days.

“I remember a Jamaican doctor in Haiti, pulling out rubble from a hole in the head of a Haitian whose wound was bandaged without the wound being cleaned. The same thing with a little boy, and I heard a man tell another doctor ‘thank you’ after just cutting off his legs, which was gangrenous,” he said.

Among the favourites from his repertoire is the photo of a woman who stripped naked and stood between the statues at Emancipation Park. Another was of a bird perched on a stump in the water along the old Portmore Causeway. He caught the bird getting into flight mode, with the shadow cast suggesting a double image.

Both are award-winning photos.

Allen has won more than five Press Association of Jamaica awards over the years, last entering in 2014.

erica.virtue@gleanerjm.com