By Tom May - Source: Digital Camera World
Kate Moss on her 33rd birthday at The Dorchester hotel, January 2007 (Image credit: Greg Brennan)
Any photographer who has ever shown work publicly knows the feeling: you press the shutter, the image enters the world, and from that moment on you have little control over what others decide it means.
Greg Brennan’s new book, The Big Shot, published by ACC Art Books, is built around that exact dynamic.
Over three decades on the front line of British press photography, Brennan has photographed Jack Nicholson, Kate Moss, Lady Gaga, Mike Tyson, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Barack Obama, among many others.
The book pairs more than 100 of those images with Brennan’s own account—co-written with his son Dylan—of what was happening when the shutter clicked.
That gap between what a photograph seems to show and what was actually going on becomes the book’s real subject.
The cover image is the clearest example: supermodel Kate Moss slumped on a staircase in a fur coat, cigarette packet in hand—an image that circulated for years as proof of a wild night out and became part of tabloid mythology.
According to Brennan, the picture was taken early in the evening while Moss simply waited for a car to collect her for a birthday party. He’d gone home by seven o’clock. The photograph never changed; the story wrapped around it did, repeatedly, for two decades.
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The camera doesn’t lie, but nor does it explain
It’s a story many photographers will recognize, whether shooting red carpets or family birthdays. A single frame, stripped of context, invites the viewer to supply a narrative—and that guess is often wrong, or at least incomplete.
Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton at The Ivy, Covent Garden, July 2001 (Image credit: Greg Brennan)
Jack Nicholson at The Wolseley, Piccadilly, January 2008 (Image credit: Greg Brennan)
Tom Cruise, September 1998 (Image credit: Greg Brennan)
This is where captioning becomes as important as composition. Brennan’s images still land decades later because they’re anchored in specifics: the time of night, who was actually in the car, what was said.
Strip away that context and you get what happened to the Kate Moss photograph: a picture pressed into service for a story it was never telling.
For anyone documenting events—professionally or for a personal archive—it’s a strong argument for writing down the facts while they’re fresh, rather than trusting the image to speak for itself. Photographs are excellent at capturing a moment, but often poor at explaining it.
Being prepared
Another lesson threaded through The Big Shot is less about any single frame and more about the accumulated grind behind an entire career.
Brennan’s archive spans ringside boxing shots—like his close, sweat-and-tape portrait of Mike Tyson before a fight—through to royal weddings and film premieres, and none of it reads as luck.
It reads as decades of being in position, camera ready, night after night, for the handful of moments that ended up mattering.
Mike Tyson training ahead of his fight with Julius Francis at the Grosvenor House Hotel, January 2000 (Image credit: Greg Brennan)
Lady Gaga at Annabel’s, Mayfair, December 2013 (Image credit: Greg Brennan)
The Big Shot: Photographs by Greg Brennan is out now (Image credit: Greg Brennan / ACC Art Books)
That’s a less romantic version of press photography than the “right place, right time” cliché suggests, but it’s probably the more honest one. And it’s why a book built on Brennan’s own recollections, rather than just the pictures, is worth reading – for the process as much as the results.
The Big Shot: Photographs by Greg Brennan is published by ACC Art Books. Hardback, 224 pages, 69 colour and 76 black-and-white images, ISBN 9781788843539.
Tom May is a freelance writer and editor specializing in art, photography, design and travel. He has been editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. He has also worked for a wide range of mainstream titles including The Sun, Radio Times, NME, T3, Heat, Company and Bella.