Happy snapper

Graham Bool has been taking photos since he was a boy. He explains how a childhood fascination has become a career that’s taken him round the world

I’ve always been interested in photography. At an early age, I got hold of a cheap camera and became the bane of my mother’s life, going round photographing airliners at 30,000 feet on black and white film that came up like dots.

That interest continued through my school days. Later I spent seven or eight years in photographic retail, running the showroom for Agfa in Piccadilly.

After a stint in PR, I found I’d had enough of being behind a desk and wanted to use what I’d learned photographically. That’s pretty much what I did and I’ve been doing it ever since.

I do all sorts of subjects, from portraits and conferences to the occasional party and sport.

Sport I got drawn back to really. I was on the GB Paralympic team for 12 years and played wheelchair basketball in 1972, 1976 and 1980, retiring when my children were born.

I’d been out of the game a few years when a chap from the old British Sports Association for the Disabled got in touch and said: “Why don’t you shoot sport?”

At the time I didn’t have the kit but I soon got some and it’s grown from there. I shot my first Paralympics in Barcelona in 1992 and I’ve been doing that ever since. I hope to shoot London in 2012 and I’m looking forward to Rio in 2016, if I’m still breathing.

Photographing the Paralympics is fun but knackering. Typically, you try and get there three or four days before, to adjust to the jetlag but also to recce all the venues, because whatever the information says, there are always issues.

Being a photographer using a chair, you don’t necessarily go through all the doorways that the walking guys go through. Checking out press venues and things like that is all very important stuff.

I had polio when I was 18 months old. To begin with I had these bloody great callipers that they used to make you wear then.

Eventually I learnt to walk with a stick and that went on well past my teens when I began to experience muscle weakness and changed to crutches. I could still work on my feet, but it was handy to have people around to lug the bags and cases.

Then I realised I could work more quickly and efficiently using a chair and I’ve done so ever since, though sometimes it isn’t an option.

My most memorable recent job was Beijing. I’d been warned that the Chinese were unhelpful and would look at you and stare. I found the opposite. With the exception of one or two taxi drivers, all the people running the outfit, the volunteers, the people in the street and people we met who desperately wanted to speak English, everyone was just fantastic. Beijing was memorable, enjoyable and exhausting, but I’d go again.

• Graham Bool was talking to Paul Carter

GRAHAM BOOL: CAREER PATH

• 1955-1963 – Hatchford Park Residential School for The Physically Handi­capped, Surrey
• 1963-64 – Archbishop Temples School, Lambeth Road, South London
• 1964-67 – Civil Service
• 1968 – Decca Navigator, Bought Ledger Dept
• 1968-69 – Dixons Cameras & Hi-fi – assist. manager
• 1969-77 – Agfa Gevaert, manager of photographic showroom in Piccadilly
• 1977-87 – Film, TV & Video with West End PR company
• 1983 – Began own business
• 1987 – present day – Graham Bool Photography