Headline talk: photographer TOM HUNTER talking to the Guardian’s SIMON HATTENSTONE

words Charlotte Lafferty / images Ash Tailor and Christian Anderson

Photographers Tom Hunter, Eamon McCabe and self-titled ‘image-maker’ Chris Levine (he’s not being pretentious, I don’t think, he just uses light to create an image for a ‘photographer’ to take) sat down this afternoon to discuss their work with Guardian journalist Simon Hattenstone. In their informal chat they revealed how they got into the competitive photography industry to the attentive audience of budding photographers.

Being a former picture editor McCabe’s tips were aimed at the hopeful photojournalists telling the audience to be most importantly passionate about their work. ‘Photograph your heros, photograph what you’re passionate about, something that’ll make you stay up all night scanning.’ He also bravely told us his top tip, ‘the Daily Telegraph has the best ideas’ while sitting next to a Guardian journalist and is avid that if you read the Telegraph for a week you’ll get at least 20 ideas for photos in the little news snippets and features.

East-End photographer Tom Hunter also stated the importance for passion and interest in what you’re photographing, which is more than evident in his personal photographs of friends, families and the injustices that concern him directly. When asked how he got into the industry and Hattenstone asked how many doors he knocked on to get where he is, he replied that ‘he made his own house and got people to knock on my own door’. A certain truth when you realise the content of his work which has often focused on housing issues in Hackney revealing the lives of squatters. He created his house by exhibiting his own work in his own places, ‘in unusual sizes and locations’. And it worked, Saatchi came knocking on his door straight away.

Light artists, and ‘image-maker’s’ Levine’s tips focused on the importance of selling your work, and believing in it, ‘do what you believe in and generally people respond well to that’. If you’re doing something new you have to show them the way, ‘make them understand what you can do for them, rather than what they can do for you.’ And it’s worked him, Levine didn’t have to ask to photograph the Queen.