A career that began in York and then spanned the world has come to a triumphant end. John Giles, whose awards include British Press News and Sports Photographer of the Year, tells JOHN WOODCOCK how a setback put him behind the lens.

AT 16 John Giles had a stroke of good fortune he didn’t recognise at the time. He discovered he was colour blind. It cost him his chosen career, but redirected him into a vivid world of black and white – what was then the monochrome medium of newspapers.

It’s a fine irony that his ‘eye’ for a picture, a gift that has made him an internationally acclaimed news and sports photographer, emerged after his eyes had failed him elsewhere.

When he left York’s Nunthorpe Grammar School in the mid-1960s with a clutch of O-levels, his ambition was to be a graphic artist. That door appeared to open for him at Ben Johnson’s, then a major printing company based on Boroughbridge Road, but closed in his face when he went for a medical.

“They said I was colour blind, not severely but sufficient for it to be a handicap when working with subtle shades. It didn’t affect my everyday life, and hasn’t since, but I wouldn’t be able to do the job I wanted then and that was that. I was gutted.”

It was an era when most school-leavers had options that seem inconceivable now. Soon after John saw an advert in the Yorkshire Evening Press. The paper wanted a trainee photographer.

It involved a long apprenticeship and he remembers the indenture papers being signed by his father who’d moved the family to York from Tyneside when he went to work at RAF Fylingdales.

So began John’s passion for the camera, and what the lens could say about the world and events and people, the famous, the heroic and the unknown, that endured until his recent retirement nearly 50 years later.

On the Press, when it was based in Coney Street, he began learning his craft on a Speed Graphic plate camera, and as technology developed so did an outstanding career. It brought him many awards but he says the personal high point came almost at the end when he was the Press Association’s photographic editor at the London Olympics, the sixth Games he covered for Britain’s national news agency which he joined in 1988.

As well as leading a team and handling their flow of material, he made time to point his own camera and caught Usain Bolt kissing the track after winning gold in the 200m. The image was published around the world and Giles considers it among his finest. His portfolio reveals numerous candidates for that title, and also a striking pattern.

Be they unidentified members of the public or the likes of Sir Chris Hoy, Jessica Ennis, Venus Williams or Tom Daley, several of his memorable frames show solitary figures detached for an instant from the momentous or dramatic events surrounding them.

Perhaps the classic example is a picture he took in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster. He was the only photographer still in the stadium and transmitting the horrific scenes from two hours before. He broke off, returned to the pitch with his camera and saw a lone Liverpool supporter, head in hands, sitting among the debris of the Leppings Lane terrace where 96 others lost their lives. It is now recognised as probably the most poignant photograph of that shattering afternoon, requiring not a word of explanation.

Capturing the unrepeatable moment in which an image speaks for itself is a constant theme in Giles’s work, be it sport, the weather, war in Bosnia and Iraq, entertainment, politics, riots or covering the royals.

He’s achieved it time and again: a lone policeman trudges past the cockpit remains of Pan Am Flight 103 at Lockerbie; a haunted Gordon Brown during a crisis in his Premiership; a young girl on The Mall in London on the day of the Queen Mother’s funeral; the incongruity of life during The Troubles in Northern Ireland; a Yorkshire miner at the end of the last shift at his redundant pit; the Archbishop of York riding in a tank…

Giles describes how hard work, instinct and luck often combined to freeze a scene or expression and give it meaning beyond the ordinary.

He had to be flexible too, ready to switch assignments and head for the nearest airport. In 1996 he was covering the cricket World Cup in India when he was diverted to Pakistan to record Diana, Princess of Wales, visiting a children’s hospital. The result was an award-winning image.

A personal favourites is from the funeral of the 11th Duke of Devonshire on the Chatsworth estate eight years ago. Giles was in position before the rest of the media pack and took a shot of the hearse passing between uniformed ranks of estate employees that prompted social commentary. “Can this be England in 2004?” asked The Guardian.

John, who throughout his career and travels has continued to live in the York area, says: “It’s been a fantastic and privileged experience and one of the lessons I can pass on is that you don’t have to be an obnoxious paparazzi to do the job. Respect people and situations, have passion, and never stop looking and thinking. There are powerful images out there waiting to be taken. Why shouldn’t it be you taking them?”