My favourite Tom Jenkins photo is not in this book, but it is on my mantelpiece. The picture is of a Chelsea v Manchester City match at Stamford Bridge, Craig Bellamy has just scored and is mid-jump, fist pumping the air in celebration, Carlos Teves is running over to join him, a steward looks miserable as hell while trying to maintain po-faced neutrality, a ballboy is on the verge of tears, and meanwhile the City fans are in ecstasies. There are hundreds in the picture, so sharply delineated you could write short stories about each one. It took a good five minutes before I spotted myself and my daughter – my eyes closed in joyous disbelief, her mouth wide open. It’s classic Jenkins – not so much snapshot as tableau. → Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
The goals? Yes, of course he captures all that stuff. But what Jenkins, sports photographer of the year too many times to count, is interested in is the emotion; the killer detail that tells you more about what’s going on inside a player’s head than an MRI scan. → Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
So there’s introverted Jonny Wilkinson, having just won rugby’s World Cup with an injury time drop-kick, head bowed as he makes his way through the tunnel, desperate to get away from the crowd; → Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
Zinedine Zidane in the World Cup final, walking headfirst into a goalpost just before walking headfirst into Marco Materazzi and getting sent off; → Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
Kelly Holmes, eyes on stalks, having just realised she’s won Olympic gold; → Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
The pitch invasion at Stoke City after promotion, with Richard Cresswell at the centre on his knees in an act of supplication; → Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
Andrew Flintoff consoling Australia’s Brett Lee. → Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
Jenkins, who grew up in Sevenoaks, Kent, was always mad about sport. Saturday afternoon meant Grandstand. He watched with such glue-eyed intensity that his parents feared for him. He recorded every ball at the cricket. → Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
He would have loved to have taken up sport professionally – football, cricket, golf – but they fell away one by one as he realised he wasn’t good enough. → Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
It was in art at school that he got his introduction to photography. One day, the former Guardian picture editor Eamonn McCabe, another great sports photographer, came to talk to the class, and that was that career-wise. Jenkins decided against a degree in photography when he was told that he would be talking about photos more than taking them, so he studied for a diploma at Gwent College of Higher Education in Newport, wasn’t allowed to take a sports photo for his first 18 months there, and says it was the making of him. → Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
By his early 20s, he was working at the Guardian. Jenkins, 44, is a quiet, unassuming man. It’s only when he talks about his work that the steeliness emerges; how he’ll arrive at a football match three hours early to get the best position; how he’ll take the law into his own hands – for the picture at Stoke, he left his posting five minutes before the end of the match, crept up the stairs to the top of the stand next to the directors’ box, with minimal equipment so he wouldn’t be spotted, and managed to capture the scene just in time. → Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
Then there’s the occasion he caught pneumonia taking the astonishing Somme-like photo of the Tough Guy endurance race in mid-Staffordshire. “Most people don’t finish it. They get carted off with hypothermia and broken legs.” In the end, it was the smoke from the burning bales of hay that did for his lungs. Who sent him on such a cruel mission? “I did.” He grins. → Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
There’s a wonderful symmetry in many of these photographs: rival fans at the Manchester derby in 2008 spontaneously raising scarves in tribute to the victims of the Munich air disaster 50 years earlier; → Photograph: Tom Jenkins/Tom Jenkins
→ Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
Divers Blake Aldridge and Tom Daley almost perfectly synchronised at the Beijing Olympics, a shot for which Jenkins had to obtain permission to be strapped to a girder in the roof. → Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
He admits he’s a bit obsessive. Just listen to his explanation of how he planned the eclipse of Rafa Nadal as the sun set over Wimbledon. “I call it the golden hour – if it’s a sunny day on Centre Court, the low light creates nice shadows and left-handed players at this end of the court look towards where the sun is. Because he’s left-handed, the sun hits him. I suppose I’ve got a brain for thinking about these things.” → Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
Some of the photographs torture him. Take Zidane walking into that post. He knew the great French footballer was cracking up at this point. “I thought, my God, I’ve never seen anybody do that before, smack into the post, it’s almost like a comedy scene. Boom! The game carried on, and I was thinking should I keep on him because the best player in the world is losing it.” But he couldn’t because he had to follow the match, so all he was left with is the image of him walking into the post. “I like this picture, but it is also a reminder of the biggest regret of my career. I just think, if only I’d stayed on him for two minutes more.” → Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
Jenkins says that in the old days, Fleet Street’s sports writers would dismiss the photographers as “monkeys” and he’s not sure attitudes have changed much. “People think we sit behind a goal with long lenses on and spray everything, hoping to get it. There’s a feeling that we’re not artistic, that we’re smudgers. I hope this book helps to dispel that.” → Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
In The Moment: The Sports Photography Of Tom Jenkins is published by Guardian Books at £30. To order a copy for £20, including UK mainland p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop, or call 0330 333 6846. An exhibition of images from the book is at Kings Place Gallery, 90 York Way, London N1 9AG from 29 June-24 August 2012. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
