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  • Writer's pictureFrancesca Mazzola

A LIFE WITHOUT FILTERS

Being a working woman is quite normal today but what was being the only woman boss in a newsroom in the ‘80s? Patricia Elkins, ex picture editor of the Daily Star, talks about it.


Everyone is turning their heads looking at her, she fiercely walks in the newsroom, but her presence is a rare event: she is a woman, the first woman to be entitled as picture editor in a national newspaper in the UK.


Patricia Elkins worked at Daily Star from 1987 until 1991 pursuing a career that was utopian at the time.


Her life was about searching, digging and finding the best photo under a pile of hundreds of photographs describing hundreds of stories.


Nudity, defects, beauty, ugliness, and secrets once hidden were discovered by readers turning a page.


“I remember when I used to enter the newsroom, they had a chalk notice board with all sort of initials and figures, a few days later somebody told me they were trying to see who was going to shag me first,” firmly says Elkins.


She is 76 and she retired in Spain living day by day under a sunny sky. Her life now is different from what it used to be before leaving the rainy and steamy London.


“Difficult days,” says Elkins, days different from the #metoo movement or women fighting for gender pay gap today.


Her eyes are looking somewhere, somewhere far away from the present, as if she is seeing the headlines that made her life so peculiar again.


Her career begun quite by chance, in fact, her job was assisting and organizing interviews and important affairs for the editor of The Weekend Telegraph during its launch in 1964.

“I was a really bad secretary, so I was sent into the picture department to help there, and so my career started,” she says.


She didn’t have a clue on how to take a picture neither recognising a clear, vivid and interesting shot but that didn’t stop her learning and working for some of the best publications such as Women Magazine, New Magazine, The Sunday Mirror, and The Telegraph Magazine.


Each photo would have been manually analysed and each choice was crucially important for the final result.


The Daily Star was at its best with an unthinkable circulation compared to 2019, “My first impression of Patrica was good, she had an air of confidence about her without coming across as cocky,” says Mark Bourdillon, Times Inc. photographer and friend.


The atmosphere at Fleet street was impregnated by cigarettes, alcohol, and misogyny, “however in all the years I worked with Patricia, her gender was never an issue with any of her photographers, it was just that secretly we all loved her,” adds Bourdillon.


Being a good picture editor is also supporting, enhancing and reinforcing the context in which the article is written, “nowadays everyone has a camera and I imagine magazine receive tons of pictures, everything is so celebrity driven and the quality of photography has decreased,” says Elkins.


Back in the days Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram didn’t exist and there were no filters that could make a photo look better, “there were no second chances to rescue a bad photo, the picture had to be properly exposed and composed,” says Jim Taylor, Patricia Elkins’s friend from 25 years and freelance picture editor.


Social media though are not only changing the way photography is perceived but it is also a source of fake news – which half of the population regularly see on Facebook- but most importantly a proof of women’s voices, “It’s still a man’s world and women must be tough,” says Daily Star’s picture editor.


Patricia Elkins remembers the first time she saw an Apple Mac in the office but “photoshopping wasn’t still there and it was very easy spotting a manipulated picture”.


Even if she was unknown in Fleet street, Patricia was appointed by a very experienced editor and picture editor. Mark Bourdillon, in fact, remarks: “I and my colleagues knew she would have to be talented and this wasn’t a selection made on looks, despite Patricia’s very classy demeanour,”.


Eighteen staff photographers would work hard next to Patricia Elkins and “at the end I realized I was the boss,” says her while laughing recalling those moments.


After her career she moved to Catalonia because of the sunny weather, “I am glad to be in Spain now and not in Brexit Britain”.

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