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The collection holds a near complete set of portrait and photo-journalistic work produced by Don McPhee between c1970-2000. It also contains Index, cuttings and work books relating to aspects of McPhee's photographic practice. Where possible the collection has been catalogued to reflect McPhee's original system of arrangement.
Cataloguing is ongoing, please contact the archivist for more details on the collection.

Administrative/Biographical history: Don McPhee was a Guardian staff photographer based in Manchester. He began contributing to the paper in 1968 and joined staff in 1971 on retirement of Tom Stuttard. His extensive photojournalistic output includes series on miners' strikes, pensioners, Belfast riots, British agriculture, South African and United States presidential election campaigns. His portraiture work includes; Nelson Mandela, Jesse Jackson, Margaret Thatcher, Neil Kinnock and Enoch Powell. A Guardian photography enthusiast, McPhee conducted intitial research with Denis Thorpe on the '100 Years of Guardian Photography' project. Also discovered original glass plate negatives by the Guardian's first photographer Walter Doughty whilst cleaning out an old staff darkroom (see WHD). He said of his work 'You Have What I Saw'. Worked predominantly in black and white (but later with colour) using plate cameras, 120 square format film, 35mm film and digital formats. Received an Honorary degree from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2000. Solo exhibitions include; 'The View From Manchester', Manchester Art Gallery (2005), 'Don McPhee: Photographer', Guardian Newsroom (2008) and 'You Have What I Saw', Cornerstone Gallery, Liverpool (2011). Group exhibitions include 'A Long Exposure: 100 Years of Guardian Photography', The Lowry, Manchester (2008-9). Publications include 'Don McPhee: Photographer' (2008), The Guardian.

Glass plate negatives, lantern slides and prints for photographs taken by Walter Doughty during the first 24 years of his Manchester Guardian career.

Administrative/Biographical history: Walter Doughty was born on the 22 August 1876 in Stalybridge. Doughty joined the Manchester Guardian in 1908 as the paper's first staff photographer and continued to work occasionally for the paper and the Manchester Evening News after his retirement in 1949. He was an innovative photojournalist; he was the first newspaperman to photograph the city of Manchester from the air in 1919 when the Manchester Corporation opened its first municipal aerodrome. It is also believed he covered the civil war in Ireland for the paper in 1922 with a camera he either made himself, or had custom built for his use. Part of his obituary from The Guardian, 29 May 1958, reads 'In the files of the office his pictures throughout the Edwardian and Georgian eras would make a fine illustrated history of the North of England from the last 50 years', making him the first in a strong line of Manchester-based Guardian photographers who would continue in this tradition, amongst them Tom Stuttard, Robert Smithies, Don McPhee and Denis Thorpe. He died at his Alderley Edge home on 27 March 1958.