As a photographer with the Magnum agency during the 1960s, Terry Sharples – who has died aged 81 – was present at many of the pivotal moments of that turbulent decade.
Unfortunately, he will be best remembered for his uncanny ability to miss the crucial shot, either by accident or, most commonly, incompetence.
On November 22, 1963, Sharples -- who was born in Kendal -- was in position at Dealey Plaza, Dallas awaiting the Presidential motorcade containing John F Kennedy. Moments before the fatal shots were fired from the Book Depository, however, Ethel and John Finkler, visiting from Illinois, asked if he would take their picture.
Sharples obliged, with the result that he missed the assassination. The so called “Finkler Shot” is estimated to have cost Magnum over $750bn in syndication fees alone – although the Finklers did pay Sharples five dollars for a copy of the photograph.
Dispatched in disgrace to Magnum’s remote Saigon bureau, Sharples was quickly presented with an opportunity to redeem himself when Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc set himself on fire in protest at persecution by the South Vietnamese government.
Despite being informed of time and place of the event by Duc himself, Sharples took a wrong turn and became hopelessly lost in Saigon’s one-way system. By the time he arrived he was half an hour late and the iconic image had already been taken by photojournalist Malcolm W Browne, who happened to be passing.
Demoted to the post of darkroom assistant, Sharples admitted to friends that his career as a front-line photographer was over. However in 1968 he was offered one last chance at redemption when he was sent to Mexico as part of the agency’s team covering the Olympics.
Assigned to collect rolls of film from the photographers in the stadium, Sharples found himself by the podium just as the medal ceremony for the 200m was about to take place.
“[Magnum photographer] Don McCullin said he needed to use the john and asked me if I’d take the shot of Tommie Smith getting his medal,” Sharples recalled in his 1986 biography Negative Image – My Life As A Photographic Failure.
“His exact words as he walked away were: ‘Just get the shot, Terry – even you can’t fuck this one up’.
"Then Smith and John Carlos put on these black gloves and reached for the sky, and I’m thinking ‘This is it!’ and I take the shot – the iconic black power shot. But of course I only had my finger over the goddamn lens.”
This was one failure too many for Magnum, and Sharples was dismissed. A subsequent career as a wedding photographer ended in numerous law suits from disgruntled couples and he spent the rest of his working life as a tourist guide in his home town of Snakeoil, Wyoming.
He never married.
Terry Sharples, photographer, was born on May 6, 1943 in Kendal. He died on September 20, 2024
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