And her triple portrait of Evans, Rupert Murdoch and William Rees-Mogg at the press conference to announce Murdoch’s takeover of the Times and Sunday Times in 1981 could not be more prescient. She photographed Andy Warhol through a gauze curtain, a subtle rejoinder to his studied aloofness.
The torqued body and flailing arms – a single exposure – gives the image an uncanny vibrancy. What might have ended up as a good but not particularly memorable photograph was transformed when a surprise wave washed across Pontin’s feet. For her portrait of Sir Fred Pontin, Soames had him stand with his back to the sea. Photograph: Sally Soames/Courtesy of the Sunday Times It is a wonderful feeling – a tremendous closeness of two people.” You are giving them something and they are giving you something. She described her work as “emotional documentary” and explained the method as follows: “There is a certain point when the person forgets they are being photographed. But it was a personal assignment inside Auschwitz in 1979 that seemed to really deepen her understanding of the emotional potential of photography. Her tender portrait of a soldier who has lost an eye being visited by one of his comrades at Tel HaShomer hospital is an extraordinary study of empathy.
She covered the Yom Kippur war in 1973 and, in his last despatch before being killed by a Syrian missile, the foreign correspondent Nicholas Tomalin wrote: “There can be no doubt that Sally Soames is the first English woman photographer to stand bolt upright throughout a Sukhoi attack snapping pictures as if she were covering a golf tournament.”
Those who worked with her remember her fearlessness as well as her striking appearance. It was a portrait – a melancholic image of a reveller at Trafalgar Square on New Year’s Eve, 1960 – that first launched Sally Soames’s career, winning a competition in the Evening Standard.
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