LONDON.- More than 50 acclaimed photographers, including Nan Goldin, David Bailey and Don McCullin (and a sprinkling of collectors, composers, directors and actors) have come together to reveal which are the special images that had a life-changing effect on them. The resulting book, The Photograph That Changed My Life, tells the stories behind their choices. The book is the brainchild of Zelda Cheatle, a long-esteemed photography gallerist and curator, whose rolodex of significant names across the globe in the photography world is probably second to none. The range of international contributors to the book bears witness to her long, lustrous career as a ground-breaking gallerist and curator, although her own choice is not revealed.

The photographs they have chosen, says Cheatle, are not part of the daily visual onslaught but “are important images, seared into memory, a myriad of photographs that has, in some way, stopped people in their tracks.” And while each contributor approaches their task quite differently, all are generous with their confidences. “I could never have predicted their choices nor the stories," she says. “Really, they have all been themselves. They haven’t tried to write something their agent would say was a good idea – they have written from the heart.”

Sometimes an artist draws a satisfying line directly back to their own work. When Nan Goldin writes of her choice of Larry Clark’s 1971 untitled image of explicit drug use, she says: “Larry’s work was an epiphany. It gave me permission to take my own work seriously and to publish a book of my own life.” Influence seeps down the generations when an image from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Goldin’s now-classic 1980s series, is chosen here by Welsh punk feminist photographer, Megan Winstone. That master of the ambiguous, staged tableau, Gregory Crewdson, selects After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California, July 1979 by Joel Sternfeld and pinpoints its influence: “… the sense of light, colour, the unresolved narrative element, the suggestion of some kind of occurrence that has undercut ordinary everyday life – all captured from a slight remove”.

War photographer Don McCullin surprises by offering his own photograph from 1958, Guvnors, Finsbury Park Gang, which might well have saved him from a life of skulduggery in north London. “Looking back, if it weren’t for that one image, my life might have been so different, one of crime and thievery.” David Bailey, who has captured so many beauties, talks his way back in time through possible historic contenders, finally arriving at The Haystack, Lacock from 1844, by pioneering photographer, William Henry Fox Talbot. “I can hardly believe this picture has had so much influence on me – it is not only significant in the history of photography; it is history.”

Where do we come from asks actor, photographer and producer Richard Gere, responding with remarkable openness. He sees his grandfather, a farmer, standing with his crop – “Simple and honest. Vast. And beautiful.”




Cheatle had started work on The Photograph That Changed My Life before lockdown, but “in terms of this project, lockdown was an amazing opportunity because globally everyone was at home. I could get Duane Michals at home, I could get Arthur Tress in his house… It was a good time to catch up and chat to people, and they had time for the book.”

Cheatle’s challenge sends several photographers on extended personal journeys of rediscovery. American artist Alec Soth hunts down a book last seen decades ago about psychiatric photography that contains his chosen 19th-century portrait. “I knew that this man, in this book, was the right portrait for me. I am pleased now that I have opened up another valve that I can talk about, this task really made me think. I was terrified of photographing people, I avoided it and made landscapes for a long time. But I felt the pull…”

Cheatle’s invited ‘choosers’ are a very personal mix of different sorts of photographers, artists and collectors – from different generations, backgrounds and at different career points – “but they all fit in the book because it’s all about people choosing a picture.”

The full list of choosers is:
Alec Soth; Alex Prager; Andy Summers; Adam Broomberg; Arthur Tress; Awoiska van der Molen; Barry Lewis; Bill Borden; David Bailey; David George; Don McCullin; Donovan Wylie; Duane Michals; Eileen Perrier; Gareth McConnell; Gregory Crewdson; Hannah Starkey; Harriet Logan; Jack Davison; Jocelyn Pook; Joel-Peter Witkin; John Claridge; Joy Gregory; Mari Mahr; Max Richter; Megan Winstone; Michael Walter; Michael Lindberg; Nadav Kander; Nan Goldin; Nion McEvoy; Pierre Brahm; Ralph Gibson; Richard Gere; Richard Learoyd; Robert Taylor; Roger Ballen; Ryan McGinley; Sandra Lousada; Seamus McGarvey; Seamus McGibbon; Seamus Murphy; Simon Norfolk; Sue Davies; Takashi Arai; Tessa Traeger; Todd Hido; Valerie Sadoun; W.H. Hunt; Yulia Mahr; Zhang Kechun.

Zelda Cheatle is a British photography curator, gallerist, editor and educator. She began her career at The Photographers’ Gallery, London in 1981. In 1989, she opened the Zelda Cheatle Gallery in Covent Garden, moving to Mount Street, Mayfair in 1997. As lead curator for the World Photography Organisation for many years, Cheatle has spoken extensively about photography and its place as fine art.

Her recent photographic exhibitions include Cecil Beaton in both the State Hermitage,
St Petersburg and Blenheim Palace; Yan Wang Preston in China; photography from the Gulf countries exhibited in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; the Dubai Photo Exhibition comprising 868 photo works; and a forthcoming show at the Royal Photographic Society in Bristol.