For 20 years, everyone assumed Kate Moss was drunk on that staircase. Greg Brennan, who took the photo, says she was just waiting for a car home from a party

Every photographer who’s ever put work in front of the public knows the feeling: you press the shutter, the picture goes out into the world and, from that point on, you have almost no control over what people decide it means.

Greg Brennan’s new book, The Big Shot, published by ACC Art Books, is built around that exact dynamic.

Across three decades on the front line of British press photography, Brennan has photographed Jack Nicholson, Kate Moss, Lady Gaga, Mike Tyson, Cristiano Ronaldo and Barack Obama, among many others.

The book pairs over 100 of those images with his own account, co-written with his son Dylan, of what was actually happening when the shutter clicked.

The gap between those two things – what the photograph seems to show and what was actually going on – turns out to be the real subject of the book.

Its cover image is the clearest example: supermodel Kate Moss, slumped on a staircase in a fur coat, cigarette packet in hand, an image that circulated for years as evidence of a wild night out and became part of her tabloid mythology.

According to Brennan, the picture was taken early in the evening while Moss simply waited for a car to collect her for a birthday party. He’d gone home by seven o’clock. The photograph never changed. The story wrapped around it did, repeatedly, for two decades.

The camera doesn’t lie, but nor does it explain

That’s a story many photographers will recognize, whether you’re shooting red carpets or family birthdays. A single frame, stripped of context, is an invitation for the viewer to guess at a narrative – and the guess is very often wrong, or at least incomplete.

This is where captioning becomes as important as composition. Brennan’s images work because they’re backed up, decades later, by the specifics: the time of night, who was actually in the car, what was said.

Strip that context away and you’re left with exactly what happened to the Kate Moss photograph: a picture doing the work of a story it was never actually telling.

For anyone documenting events, whether professionally or for their own archive, it’s a strong argument for writing down the facts while they’re still fresh, rather than trusting the image to speak for itself. Photographs can be very good at capturing a moment, but often quite bad at explaining it.

Being prepared

Another lesson threaded through The Big Shot is less about a single frame and more about the accumulated grind behind the whole career.

Brennan’s archive spans ringside boxing shots, like his close, sweat-and-tape portrait of Mike Tyson before a fight, right through to royal weddings and film premieres – and none of it reads as luck.

It reads as decades of simply being in position, camera ready, night after night, for the handful of moments that ended up mattering.

That’s a less romantic version of press photography than the “right place, right time” cliché suggests, but it’s probably the more honest one. And it’s why a book built on Brennan’s own recollections, rather than just the pictures, is worth reading – for the process as much as the results.

The Big Shot: Photographs by Greg Brennan is published by ACC Art Books. Hardback, 224 pages, 69 colour and 76 black-and-white images, ISBN 9781788843539.