Doreen Spooner

Doreen Spooner (30 January 1928 – 20 April 2019) was the first woman to work as a staff photographer on a Fleet Street newspaper during a forty-year career, mostly on the Daily Mirror.

Career Doreen Spooner was born in Muswell Hill, North London on 30 January 1928, to Ada (née Tribe) and Len Spooner. She was encouraged in her career choice by her father Len, picture editor at the Daily Herald. Several other men in her family were employed on other papers.

Daily Mirror In 1950, Spooner won the British News Picture of The Year award with her portrait of playwright George Bernard Shaw at his garden gate.

America Despite these early successes, Spooner left the Mirror when offered the opportunity to tour America as a freelancer with the Keystone Agency, where she took pictures of Albert Einstein and the reclusive Amish communities and made studies of small town American life in the early 1950s. She then worked in Paris for Keystone and also for the new, iconoclastic Magnum Agency where she knew, and was inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, both of whom had worked with her father in London. In Paris, she also met Pierre Vandeputte-Manevy, a Belgian photographer who worked for Le Figaro and was later one of the photographers of The Beatles and they married in 1952. and she rejoined the Mirror in 1963 and remained there until her retirement in 1988. and was a member of the National Council for the Training of Journalists photojournalism board,

Spooner was interviewed for the Royal Photographic Society's Journal in February 1990. In October 2016, she published her autobiography Camera Girl, published by Mirror Books. Some details of her career are also to be found in Ladies of the Street by Liz Hodgkinson,