A life in the news
Queen Elizabeth II reflected in her car mirror at the Royal Windsor Horse Show, 2017
Giant Olympic rings float on a barge opposite Parliament in 2012
Peter Macdiarmid lays the starting point of his path to photography at the door of his Guatemala-born mother, who had an unconventional upbringing. ‘She brought that to the family,’ he explains. ‘We would go and do things that were exciting, that other people wouldn’t do. Nowadays, it would be quite normal to go and look for the Royals, but in the ‘70s, when I was growing up, we would go and find where Prince Charles was playing polo. In some ways it’s remarkable that I haven’t become a Royal photographer. I think my mother’s craving for excitement was sort of in-built and that drove me towards news photography.’
He recalls spending 10p on a Box Brownie camera at a jumble sale aged 10. ‘It took some paper-wrapped Kodak film that made quite big negatives. I remember
