My friend and colleague Felix Clay, who has died aged 44 after a long illness, was a respected photographer and film-maker, gifted with creative insight, intelligence and a talent for putting people at their ease.
An outstanding portrait photographer, he took images of subjects including Stephen Hawking, Patti Smith, Jo Brand and Vicky McClure that are witty as well as technically brilliant.
However, he was also a pioneer in the field of video journalism. Working for the Guardian from 2006, he brought the sensibility of a stills photographer to the new story-telling possibilities that had opened up through digital media.
In 2009-10 he made a beautiful series for the Guardian with the writer Laura Barton, Barton’s Britain. His approach to shooting video, with every frame counting and considered, owed everything to his photographer’s eye.
One of the films in this series (about the Bridgwater canal) won first prize in the digital film category of the Press Photographer’s Year awards in 2010. He won first prize in the same awards in 2013 for feature photography.
Born in Bristol, Felix was the son of Christopher Clay, a history professor, and Diana (nee Burbidge), who was a dancer before she married. After attending Cotham grammar school, in 1994 Felix was set to follow in his father’s footsteps to study history at university when he won a competition for an internship at Magnum, one of the world’s most prestigious photographic agencies, whose founding members include Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa.
This was a defining moment, when Felix was able to develop his own style for photographing people, places and cultures. At the end of his internship he was awarded a Magnum bursary to shoot his own story. Felix travelled to Bolivia to document the cocaine trade. It was a trip filled with risk, but he came back with a stunning project showing the delicate and often perilous relationship between farmers and buyers.
Felix then joined the news agency Eyecatchers Press as a trainee. He stayed with the company after it was brought into NewsCast in 2000, rising to chief photographer. The photographer Eamonn McCabe, a director at NewsCast at the time, paid tribute to Felix’s creativity around photographing business people, “who after politicians are the hardest people to photograph”.
In 2004 Felix went freelance, and developed an impressive client list including the Observer, the New York Times, Vanity Fair and Time magazine, as well as the Guardian.
Felix had met Helen Edwards, then a student, in a London bar called The Titanic in 2000. “He was handsome and confident and completely swept me off my feet,” Helen said. After the birth of their two children, Artie and Isabella, they settled in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, and married in 2016.
Felix is survived by Helen, his children, his father and stepmother Rachel, his mother, his brother, Francis, and sister, Caroline.
