Photographer with The Herald
Born: March 31, 1949;
Died: August 21, 2017
IN all our lives there are moments that can be regarded as life-changing. Some are fleeting and can only be appreciated with hindsight. Others endure and their impact is profound, changing us and our circumstances forever. For Ian Hossack, as a newspaper photographer, capturing such moments on camera was a skill at which he excelled daily, delivering startling images that burn themselves into the memory. His pictures brought him 29 awards, worldwide acclaim and huge respect. He was a man of immense talent and charisma with two abiding passions: his work and his family. He took quiet pride in his pictures, but retained the humility of a true professional which he inherited from his father, the respected broadcast journalist and industrial editor John Hossack.
Ian Hossack was born the second of three children and began his career as a trainee on the Scottish Daily Mail in Glasgow’s York Street, moving when it closed to join the Belfast Telegraph. The Troubles pitched the young photographer into serious hard news coverage but he made an immediate impact snatching the first picture of a British soldier to be killed and building a portfolio of classic war zone images. In 1970, aged 21, he won the title of Irish Feature Photographer of the Year and retained a love of the country and its people.
He married the same year, but life on the front line in terrorist-ravaged Northern Ireland of the early Seventies was neither safe nor sound and when his wife and infant daughter came close to being injured in a Belfast bomb blast, he put his family’s wellbeing ahead of
his career and resigned. He returned to Glasgow with no job.
After six months of meagre freelancing, his fierce determination for work took him to the weekly Morecambe Guardian. It was peaceful but unchallenging. One day, a chance telephone chat with his father revealed some trade gossip – The Glasgow Herald might be looking for a photographer.
Ian picked up the phone to then picture editor Keith Blount. Come up for a chat next week, it was suggested. “Could I just come up today?” Ian replied. He went, was offered the job on the spot and in 1973 returned home to Glasgow aged 24 just as a new editor, Iain Lindsay-Smith, was about to usher in a dynamic era for the paper.
In a radical redesign, pictures were given greater prominence and Ian Hossack’s talents, alongside contemporaries like Arthur Kinloch, Eddie Jones, Jimmy Millar, Jim Connor and chief photographer James Thomson, shone out. His assignments were many and varied and added to his extensive portfolio – pictures of almost every celebrity of the day from the royal family to prime ministers and popes, trade unionists, actors and pop stars.
He always tried to convey a sense of artistry – even in his favourite subject, sport, and football in particular. He had captained Bearsden Academy's football team: 50 years on, former players still recall with admiration his prowess as a teenage centre-half. He talked with affection about Third Lanark and its demise and was a diehard Celtic fan – something he kept very much to himself, particularly if he happened to be sitting beside the Copland Road posts at Ibrox with a long lens.
He avidly followed the fortunes of the Scottish team despite a turbulent assignment to Argentina in 1978 to cover the disastrous World Cup campaign where he found himself ordered to supply pictures to both The Herald and its sister paper The Evening Times. This
meant having to field telephone instructions from sports desks and editors heedless of time differences or each other’s deadlines, and ravenous for images of Ally Macleod, Willie Johnston, Archie Gemmill or anyone who figured in the debacle.
He recalled an irate editor waking him at 5am one day demanding a shot of disgraced Willie Johnston for the next edition. Johnston was several hundred miles away in another city at the time. “Eventually I hung up on him,” he said later, adding with a wry grin. “Well, I just said it was a terrible line . . .”
During the 1980s under the editorship of Arnold Kemp, Ian’s pictures won him dozens of awards from all of the major national competitions as well as international recognition. In 1984 he was simultaneously Scottish Photographer of the Year and Scottish Sports Photographer of the Year and his work featured more than once in the World Press Photo Annual.
He admired Eamon McCabe and Chris Smith, but essentially was his own man with distinct opinions on what did and did not make the best picture of the day – an occasional source of conflict with superiors. Former colleague – and latterly picture editor of The Herald
– Jim Connor, notes: “Ian was the consummate professional: both original and unique. He was kind and considerate to subjects, but always single-minded. He was resolute in pursuit of what he saw as the best picture and would never give up until he got it. On two-handed jobs there was never any question Ian was working to get his picture into the paper in preference to
mine.”
In early 1988 at the peak of his career, tragedy struck. Neurologists diagnosed a brain tumour but deemed surgery too dangerous – even for a biopsy. He was given a stark prognosis – six weeks if it was malignant; maybe ten years if benign. The support of medical friends led to a second opinion and surgery, followed by intensive radiotherapy, took place in Edinburgh. Six years ago he underwent a second operation and chemotherapy. The doctors confessed his longevity put medicine into “uncharted territory”. Ian’s strength and willpower defied all medical expectations and while the disease was to blight his life and that of his family, he refused to give in to it.
He took early retirement from The Herald in 1999 on health grounds, but never lost his thirst for creating an image – whether it was on camera, with sharp Glaswegian humour, in rumbustious song – usually Irish in nature – or latterly, and for too brief a time, at the
painter’s easel where he displayed further artistic flair. Each medium demonstrated the keen Hossack eye: he simply could see pictures not visible to the rest of us.
Words alone do not quite seem to do him justice. To really capture the moment you
need a photograph. Ian would undoubtedly have produced one.
He is survived by Ann, his wife of 47 years, children Sinead and Paul, and grandchildren Eilidh and Robbie. Characteristically he donated his remains to medical research
and requested no religious memorial service.
Gordon Mack
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