Shortlisted Again: Rugby Photographer of the Year

The Work Was in the Room, Even If I Wasn't

The photographs hung in the World Rugby Museum at Allianz Stadium, and one of them was mine but I wasn't there to celebrate it with my friends as I was away on assignment. For the fifth time, my work had been shortlisted for Rugby Photographer of the Year, the competition run by Rugby Journal in partnership with the World Rugby Museum, this year in the Spirit category. Five shortlists, no wins and at this point I've made my peace with being very good at being nominated. And this time I wasn't even in the building to not win it, because I was working. So I gave my ticket away.

There is a group of us women who photograph rugby, who see each other at games and keep a conversation going in between. Who's hiring. What a job is worth. Whatever any of us has an ear to the ground about. It's a small thing and it has made an enormous difference to how the last few years have felt. Four of the five had been shortlisted this year. The fifth hadn't, which meant she was the only one of us without a seat that evening. I wasn't going to be using mine, and five shortlists in I have a fairly good idea how these nights end, so I wasn't giving up much. She went in my place.

What I minded was missing them. Not the not winning but the catch-up with photographer friends who have built a support network togther to help break down boundaries, share opportunities and help each other.

What "In the Room" Actually Means

Those images now hang in an exhibition at the World Rugby Museum, where people who have never heard of me will stand in front of them. They're printed in the current issue of Rugby Journal. They put down a marker about what rugby photography can be, and my view of the game is part of that conversation. That's the thing I've come round to. Being in the room was never about me being in the room. The work was there. A photographer I rate was there and I was somewhere else, doing the job that pays for the next set of pictures.

All three of those are the same argument, which is most of what this post is about.

The Image Was Called Commiserations

Here's the part I find funny, now that I've stopped minding about it. The shortlisted image isn't from the World Cup, It's from 17 November 2024, away at London Irish, in the women's Championship, where I was standing in for another photographer.

 Richmond Women lost 12–10. Two points. If you've ever played anything, you know that scoreline. It's where everybody walking off can name four moments that would have changed it.

This was grassroots rugby, in the sense that nobody was there who didn't have a reason to be. One of those November afternoons where the cold gets into your hands inside twenty minutes and the light does something extraordinary for about a quarter of an hour before it goes altogether. At the final whistle two of the Richmond players held onto each other. Not about the scoreboard but about the eighty minutes they had just put into it. The low sun came through from behind and lit the whole thing from the back, and they stayed there, holding each other up. I don't think either of them knew I was there. I took one frame and left them to it.

 I called it Commiserations because that's what it was. And then there's the postscript, which is the real reason I'm glad this is the frame that got through. The following season, Richmond went back and beat the same side. Then they kept going: fifteen wins from sixteen matches, 762 points scored, champions of Women's Championship South 1 by fourteen clear points.

 So Commiserations isn't a picture of defeat. It's a picture of the season before. Two players on a cold afternoon in November, two points down, holding each other up through a result that turned out to be the start of the run-up to a title none of us in that ground could know was coming. That's the thing about photographing sport at this level. You never know which afternoon you're standing in.

The Work I Most Wanted Seen

I also entered work from the Women's Rugby World Cup, and that didn't make the shortlist. I'll say plainly that it was the entry I cared most about, and I'll say why, because the why is the point rather than the disappointment.

Across that tournament I photographed thirteen matches, from Sunderland to Brighton, Bristol, York and Northampton, and made more than seventy thousand images. What I kept coming back to wasn't the rugby, extraordinary though it was. It was the stands. Families. First-time fans who arrived curious and left invested. Young girls watching women be revered, and young boys idolising them. Rival colours standing shoulder to shoulder celebrating what an epic journey the women’s is on as it continues to infectiously grow in support, spirt and community.

I've written elsewhere about what that tournament looked like from the inside. What I didn't say there is that I wasn't only photographing what was happening. I was photographing something I want to be true. Sport as a place where difference stops mattering for eighty minutes and sometimes rather longer than that.

I think that's what any artist is doing, if we're honest about it. You make the work that speaks to the world as you'd like it to be, and every so often the world catches up with you and hands you the frame. That tournament handed me a lot of them and rugby continues to be the sport I lean into most at every opportunity.

The Same Photograph, Taken Twice

Reading my own category properly afterwards, something struck me. The gold in Spirit went to Ryan Pierse for Women's World Cup Final, Twickenham. The bronze went to Kyle Helson for Heartbreak in the Final. Both from the biggest occasion women's rugby has ever had, at a sold-out Allianz Stadium, with the world watching. And then there's mine, from a Sunday in November in front of not very many people at all.

Same moment, though. All three of us turned away from the try line and went looking for what happens before or after the whistle. The judges put all three on the same wall. That's what I keep coming back to. The spirit of this game doesn't scale with the size of the occasion. It's the same thing at Twickenham with a full house as it is on a cold pitch in Richmond with somebody's dog wandering along the touchline. Which means the World Cup portfolio and the grassroots frame were never two separate projects competing for my attention. They were the same photograph, taken twice.

So no, my world cup portfolio didn't get shortlisted. But the thing I was trying to say with it did.

Why Paid Work Is What Makes This Work Possible

Now the part that usually gets left out of posts like this. Every photographer I know who makes work that means something funds it with work that pays. That isn't a grievance, it's arithmetic, and it's the same arithmetic as the novelist who teaches or the painter who takes commercial illustration jobs. Commissions are what make the personal work possible. When a brand, an agency or a governing body books me, they're paying for the images they need and they are also, whether they frame it this way or not, buying me the capacity to go and photograph thirteen matches across the country because I believe the story deserves it. Recognition works twice over: the fee keeps the business running, and the reputation opens the next door.

 So when I talk about wanting to be properly paid, I'm not asking to be comfortable. I'm asking for the room to keep making the work I actually care about. Those are the same request. Every well-paid assignment I take is, in a real sense, the funding round for the next thing I do for love. And it works the other way round too, which is the part that keeps me honest. The frame that got shortlisted this year came from a Sunday I was covering for somebody else, at a level of the game that pays very little and asks a great deal. I didn't take that job expecting anything from it. I took it because it was work, and because I like watching women's rugby at every level it's played. Then the light did what it did and two players held onto each other.

You can't plan for that. What you can do is stay solvent enough to keep turning up. I'd rather say that out loud than pretend the good work appears by magic.

The Loop That's Hard to Break

Which brings me to something worth saying plainly, because I don't think it gets said often enough. Women are increasingly present in sports photography, and that's real progress. Look down this year's shortlists and you'll find more of us than you would have a decade ago, Beth James and Shanni Davis in Spirit, Alice Gough in Portfolio, Amanda Murphy and Eden Riddell in Grassroots, among others.

But presence and payment are two different things. It's entirely possible to be counted in a line-up, named in a credit list, folded into somebody else's inclusion story, and still not be on the rate the men in the same media room are on. And underpayment compounds. If the commissioned work doesn't pay properly, there's no surplus. No surplus means no self-funded personal projects. No personal projects means less of the distinctive work that builds a reputation. And reputation is exactly what gets you the better-paid commissions. The loop closes, and from the outside it could look like someone lacking ambition but simply it’s like running a car into the ground.

Sometimes it feels as though you need to have come from money to have the growth room. The cushion that lets you absorb an unpaid risk, wait out a slow build, get your head above the parapet without doing the sums on what happens if it gets shot at. That's a question about class as much as gender. It just lands harder on women, because the pay gap is where it starts. I raise it because it's fixable, and because the people who can fix it are commissioners, and some of them read blogs.

Why I'll Keep Entering

Rugby is one of the most genuinely welcoming communities I've worked in, and I don't say that as a courtesy. It's also a sport that has just looked at itself honestly enough to publish research finding that eighty-three percent of women in the community game have experienced sexism, and to become the first major British sport to launch a standalone anti-sexism and misogyny policy in response. Both of those things are true at once, and a sport willing to hold them together is a sport worth staying in. 

Which brings me back to the ticket. That group of passionate rugby photographers does something I didn't have for most of the last thirty years. We flag opportunities to each other. We say when a fee is wrong. We say when a line-up doesn't look right, and we say it to people who can change it. Mostly we just keep each other going, because this is a hard environment in which to make headway and it's considerably harder on your own. This year Danté Kim was shortlisted in Grassroots for In the mud, we're all the same. Elsie Kibue-Ngare in Portrait for Rosie & Marlie. Elizabeth Terry in Action for Impact. And me in Spirit. 

Four of us, four different categories. I like that more than I can properly explain. It says something about how differently four women can look at the same sport and it's a useful corrective to the idea that "women's perspective" is a single thing anyone could commission in one go. It isn't a campaign. It's a handful of photographers deciding not to be each other's competition. 

So passing the ticket on wasn't a grand gesture, It was the obvious thing to do with a seat I couldn't use, for the one of us who didn't have one. Four of them in a room together is better than three, and I got the messages afterwards. I'll enter again. Because the work gets seen, because the argument about what rugby looks like is one I want to be in, and because five shortlists is a record I'd have taken gladly at the start of all this. 

If you're commissioning coverage of rugby or women's sport and you want images that hold what happens after the whistle as carefully as what happens during it, let's talk. Commission the work properly and you're not just buying photographs. You're funding the thing that makes them worth buying. 

You can see the full Rugby Photographer of the Year 2026 shortlist on Rugby Journal, and more of my women's rugby work here.

Rugby Journal Awards: © Jamie Lau