Remembering David Abiaw: One of Our Fallen Comrades

September 8, 2026

When I searched for David Abiaw online after his death, I found something both fitting and rather sad. There was no prominent obituary or formal account of his life, only his photographs, still circulating in newspapers, magazines, and picture libraries. The photographer had largely disappeared, but the work remained.

Those surviving credits reveal the breadth of David’s career. He photographed figures ranging from Liam Gallagher, Mariah Carey and Victoria Beckham to Prince Harry, Amy Winehouse, Johnny Depp, Beyoncé and Jay-Z. British Vogue still used a photograph of Victoria and David Beckham, taken in London in 1999, more than twenty-five years later. That is the strange afterlife of press photography: a fraction of a second can outlive the person who captured it.

I knew David for more than twenty years and shared part of that peculiar working world in which long waits could suddenly become frantic seconds of activity. He was good-natured, dryly funny and capable of being extraordinarily stubborn. With David, even disagreement could become part of the friendship.

The job was not always harmless. One night in December 2003, David and Conor Nolan photographed Blue singer Lee Ryan leaving the 10 Rooms nightclub in the early hours. The encounter ended with damaged camera equipment and a court case. Ryan was later cleared of assault but ordered to compensate David and the picture agency for the damage. It was an unusually public example of what photographers routinely risked while working outside clubs in the middle of the night.

That generation of paparazzi inhabited a world that has almost vanished. Photographers waited outside restaurants, airports, hotels and nightclubs, relying on instinct, contacts and the ability to recognise a story before anyone else did. Pictures were physically carried or transmitted to agencies, editors made rapid decisions, and a single frame could dominate the following morning’s newspapers.

Today, almost everyone carries a camera, celebrities publish their own lives, and images move through social media before a traditional picture desk has time to react. The appetite for candid moments has not disappeared; the means of producing and distributing them has changed. Much of the old camaraderie, competition and pavement knowledge has gone with it.

David’s name still appears beneath photographs taken decades ago. Each credit is a small reminder that somebody had to be there: waiting, watching and pressing the shutter at precisely the right moment. This Field Note is my way of putting the man’s name back beside the pictures and remembering one of our fallen comrades.