The Wilder, the Better

Tom Shaw was stressing. The sun was rising over the English countryside, but the light wasn’t ideal for a traditional photo shoot. He was wandering the scruffy golf course, searching for the right way to present the game to his editors back in the U.S. Finally, he realized he had to stop fighting what was in front of him. “I figured I needed to embrace this bad light,” Shaw says. “I love the morning light and evening light as much as anyone, but we get such weird weather over here. You can’t just fill a magazine with those kinds of stylized pictures. I started to think, ‘What can I offer as a difference?’”

He steadied his camera and found his inspiration: a cow making itself quite at home on the green. The course was on what the English deem “common land,” areas open to the public that house anything from parks to golf courses to livestock.

“I figured people would love that,” Shaw says. “They’d go, ‘What? Why is there a cow on a golf course? And why is he leaving a cow pat right on the green?’”

Shaw’s uncommon way of looking at the world has made him a singular figure in sports photography. Over three decades, he has traveled the world covering sports for Getty and spent 15 years as the English national cricket team’s official photographer. In 2017, he made the transition into golf with a shoot of the iconic North Berwick Golf Club for The Golfer’s Journal No. 1. He has since become TGJ’s primary U.K. photographer while picking up more golf work for the R&A.

His gradual shift to golf should be no surprise. Shaw grew up in the south of England, then moved to Scotland when he was 12. He fell in with an “artsy” group of friends who spent weekends hiking and climbing all over the Scottish countryside. He began taking his camera with him, capturing images that still captivate him.

“I’m really attracted to sports that are formed from the natural world,” Shaw says. “Golf appeals to me because of how it sits in the landscape. I think it’s just the vastness of being outside. I’m always trying to get that across in my work. The wilder, the better.”

It’s this worldview that allows Shaw to have some unconventional takes on a few golf standards. Like his tricky relationship with St. Andrews. He’d much rather brave a sideways wind at Machrihanish Dunes than march out with the phalanx of photographers at an Open Championship.

“[St. Andrews] is a really hard course to get anything out of,” he says. “I think it’s because it’s pretty flat, save for a few little humps. It’s also on the east coast [of Scotland]. It doesn’t get the weather they have on the west. It doesn’t get the drama that you get there, and the great big dunes. On the west coast my eyes light up all the time because I’ll get some brutal weather.”

Shaw is also not a huge fan of drones. While he has used them to great effect, his training as a young photographer without drones has made him skeptical.

“Sometimes [drone shots] can look spectacular, but there’s an otherworldliness to them,” Shaw says. “I could never do a shoot and then just deliver a set of drone pictures; they might illustrate a place well, but I don’t think you’d feel your way into the golf course. It becomes quite cynical, the drone stuff. What I’m generally looking for is a feeling. For how the hole, the tee box or the fairway work together. I’m looking for layers—three, four, five of them—and how they sit with each other. It sounds like a weird thing. But I can see it.”