Meet the photographer who took '˜Time for Peace' photograph

Swiss photographer René Burri said of a photograph he once took, “Maybe in a photographer’s career there are only about two, three or four images that remain, and certainly that’s one of them.”

He was talking about a photograph he took of a group of men on a rooftop in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1960. This was one of Burri’s most famous photographs in a portfolio that included pictures of Che Guevara, Winston Churchill and American troops serving in Vietnam.

When I shared Burri’s words with my father Crispin Rodwell, also a photographer, his thoughts immediately turned to one of his own iconic and career-defining benchmarks, Time for Peace.

“Peace was the one icon that I achieved in 35 years”, he said.

The picture, that on a worldwide level gained so large an audience, was, on a more domestic level, a standard bearer for the unifying opinion of the majority of Northern Ireland’s population. No doubt because it so accurately but yet simply conveyed the general consensus at the time. It was ‘Time for Peace’.

By 1994, the unrest and violence in Northern Ireland had already claimed the lives of more than 3,000 people over the course of 25 years. For many of the country’s inhabitants in which fear and intimidation had been firmly instilled, there was little hope for peace left.

On August 31, 1994, the IRA declared a complete cessation of its military activities after the organisation’s quarter of a century campaign to get the British out of Northern Ireland.

On the eve of the ceasefire announcement however, Reuters had enlisted photographer Crispin Rodwell to send them some images from Belfast to illustrate the story.

Crispin was driving down the Antrim Road in Belfast the day before, shortly after photographing Belfast Zoo’s new-born baby gorilla, when he saw children out on bicycles or playing ball with one another and enjoying the last days of their summer holiday. After parking near the bottom of Pacific Avenue,

Crispin took a photograph of a young boy throwing a ball up against the side-wall of a red-bricked house with bold white letters scrawled across it reading “Time for Peace”.

Reflecting back to the moment he took the photograph, Crispin said, “I knew it was a good picture but the response to it came as a surprise. I happened to get lucky.”

The following morning he awoke to discover that the photograph had been used on the front pages of the South China Morning Post, the Washington Post, the Sydney Morning Herald, Spain’s ‘El Mundo’, Germany’s daily national publication ‘Die Welt’, most of the UK nationals and a host of other papers around the world.

Both the Daily Telegraph and Sky News would use the image in advertising campaigns and while the IRA would end it’s ceasefire two years later by bombing the docks in London and injuring over 100 people (two fatalities), Crispin Rodwell’s photograph was already firmly etched in history and his work had, for however brief a moment, attracted worldwide attention and been noticed on a global scale.

On top of the photograph’s initial success, it was soon after used as part of the portfolio that won Crispin the titles of Irish Press Photographer of the Year, Northern Irish Press Photographer of the Year and Nikon UK Regional Photographer of the Year. It was used on over a dozen book covers, and as an illustration inside history text books.

Crispin, who is originally from Surrey, England, moved to Dublin in 2000 and developed many contradicting reputations during his career in Northern Ireland. I learned many of them first hand when I spent a week in 2008 doing work experience with Press Eye; a Belfast-based photography syndication. People in the industry who knew him would quip about how much better my ability to grow hair on my head was than his, or how I couldn’t possibly be his son because I was easily six inches taller than him at the age of 17.

Nearly everywhere I have been seen taking pictures, and at nearly every public event I covered while tinkering in freelance, there’s someone who knows of or has heard of my father. While he has the love and respect of some people, other people have more negative views. Crispin himself has joked that his funeral could be held in a phone box, and that everyone will still have room to sit down. Whether loved or loathed, the self-employed freelance photojournalist would struggle in his later years to achieve anything like what he did that day in the summer of 1994; though he would still cause the occasional tremor. Since ‘Peace’, Crispin has since won the Northern Ireland Press

Photographer of the Year Award on a further four occasions, and finished runner-up in 2007. His career tally exceeds 20 various awards from both national and international competitions.

For people like Crispin, the industry of photojournalism as a whole has suffered as the result of the digital era, wherein it has became increasingly simple for the average Joe to take stunning pictures using vastly more affordable equipment.

Especially when the ease of image acquisition means that publications, who themselves have seen sales plummet in the digital era, can obtain a much more vast multitude of photographs without even paying nor ever meeting the photographer holding the camera. Corporately-owned warehouses full of millions of 35mm negatives have been condensed or disbanded, meanwhile Crispin Rodwell, who has been working press and taking photographs professionally for over 35 years, still unremittingly sticks to the one thing he knows how to do.

When asked if he would persevere with photojournalism for the foreseeable future, in spite of the demand far less orientated on hard hitting news photographs, Crispin said he had toyed with the idea of moving more into commercial work as opposed to press, or perhaps taking on video photography, describing the circumstances for the inevitability of my question as “all very sad.”

In January 2015, after winning the News category of the Press Photographer’s Association of Ireland annual awards, Crispin simply said, “There’s life in the old dog yet.” We all hope so.