Nigel Atherton looks back at past AP issues in our archive, this week we’ve selected the 14 March 1992 issue.
This week the AP time machine stops at March 1992 to give us another opportunity to admire Roger Bamber’s sublime picture taken at the newly opened Brighton Toy Museum, depicting a man adjusting the model railway. It was part of Roger’s winning portfolio in the Features Category of the Nikon Press Awards that year which, perhaps confusingly, celebrated the best photojournalism of the year, and not just pictures taken on Nikon cameras.
In Behind the Headlines AP showcased the rest of the award winners, some of which were pretty harrowing. Indeed the lead image by Tom Stoddart, which depicted an emaciated child at a children’s mental home in northern Albania, was regarded by the newspapers as too upsetting to be published. It was part of a set of pictures that won Tom the overall Nikon Press Photographer of the Year award for the second year running.
It would be difficult to imagine a picture more different from Tom’s than Tim Robinson’s surreal AP Pic of the Week, which just shows what a broad church AP has always been. Also in that issue, we talked to Leo Dickinson who, a year earlier, had been half of the two-man team that were the first to cross Mt Everest in a hot air balloon. He shared a few pictures and anecdotes from his adventure, including how his camera kit was crushed by a yak.