Patrick Eagar: Widely regarded as the World's leading cricket photographer over 45 years.
Patrick Eagar photographed 325 Test Cricket matches, including 98 Ashes Test matches, between 1965 and 2011. Watch him tell some of the stories behind those photographs in the interview below, conducted by fellow photographer Eamonn McCabe.
BIOGRAPHY
Patrick Eagar was born into a cricketing family, with his father Desmond Eagar being the captain, and subsequently Club Secretary, of Hampshire County Cricket Club.
He studied anthropology at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he worked for Varsity newspaper and took some of his earliest photographs of cricket at Fenners.
Leaving University life behind him Eagar began photographing cricket professionally, with his first Test match as an accredited photographer being the 1965 Headingley Test between England and New Zealand.
For the next five decades, Eagar photographed cricket matches for The Sunday Times, the Wisden Cricket Magazine, and The Cricketer magazine. He also provided photographs for many hundreds of cricket books. Some of his best-known photographs include Rod Marsh’s catch to dismiss Tony Greig in 1975, England captain Michael Vaughan holding The Ashes urn after England won the 2005 Ashes, and Andrew Strauss taking a diving catch to dismiss Adam Gilchrist in the same series.
In early 2011, Eagar announced that he was retiring. He had covered 325 Test matches, including 98 Ashes Tests. Popperfoto acquired his archive in 2016 and has so far edited and scanned more than 26,000 of his best images.
