During a 16 year career with the WWF, Tom Buchanan likely worked more than 10,000 matches across the United States and around the world. But he was no professional wrestler: instead he was the promotion’s chief of photography, a role that gave him a unique insight into the development of the business.
After leaving college, Buchanan worked for several regional newspapers. One of his bosses here, Steve Taylor, went on to take the staff photographer role for WWF. In 1985 he hired Buchanan to work on a freelance basis to cover the first WrestleMania.
Shooting wrestling provided logistical challenges, with Buchanan quickly realising that being at ringside necessitated not only avoiding blocking the view of spectators, but also making sure not to get in the way of wrestlers. “In football or soccer there’s always a sort of no-mans land between the pitch and the fans where photographers can stand: if a footballer runs out of bounds, there’s enough space that they don’t usually run into somebody.
“In wrestling, the area inside the barricade is part of our stage and somewhere talent can go, so there’s no neutral area. If you’re inside the barricade you’re fair game and sometime wrestlers get territorial and try to protect their space. That said, sometimes the talent would hurt themselves because they were trying not to crash into and hurt a photographer.”
Buchanan recalls that it “took forever” to get the hand of negotiating ringside and it was something “you never completely master. It took about four to five months of consistent shooting before I really felt comfortable.”
The need for such a learning process proved particularly problematic at WrestleMania XI when footballer Lawrence Taylor wrestled in the main event. While WWF management was surely delighted to have a fleet of photographers from mainstream media outlets wanting to cover the event, it meant chaos at ringside.
“Normally with the staff photographers, I can control exactly where everyone stands. But with so many people there, the best I could do was to get them to all stay on one side of the ring. It didn’t have a big impact of me, but them being in the way it did affect some matches and Shawn Michaels nearly got into it with one of them. We found [having outsider photographers] was not controllable and it gave us reason to prohibit it in future.”
That said, Buchanan had his own WrestleMania faux pas. After Andre the Giant won a “$15,000 bodyslam challenge” over John Studd at the inaugural show, he began throwing giant fistfuls of money towards the crowd before manager Bobby Heenan stole back the bag of money. Buchanan had got caught up in the excitement and handed several of what he thought were $5 or $10 bills to fans in the front row, only to later discover the money was not only genuine but that he’d mistakenly given away several high-denomination banknotes.
Buchanan recalls that the technology available at this stage still had a long way to develop. “When I started we were simply using a flash on a 35 millimetre camera at ringside. It was not really that different to what a fan might use, it’s just that we were closer to the ring and obviously had a better eye for taking shots.
“The only real improvement we made at that stage was using the Nikon FE2,” Buchanan recalled, referring to a popular ‘semi-professional’ model of the 1980s perhaps best known for being used in the famous picture of a Tiananmen Square protestor. The FE2 was notable for syncing the flash bulb going off and the shot being taken to within 1/250th of a second of one another.
The big change came at WrestleMania 2. “We had the three location set-up and at one of the venues a Sports Illustrated photographer used remote strobes. That meant setting up flash bulbs among the lights above the ring, which were remotely triggered when the shot was taken. It worked well and from WrestleMania III we really embraced it.” Eventually the remote strobes became part of the standard lighting set-up, with half a dozen flashes located above the ring.
As the 80s rolled on, Buchanan continued picking up dates for the company and eventually replaced Steve Taylor as the chief of photography. While most of his work was for WWF Magazine and publicity shots, his job became increasingly wide-ranging and in effect he was responsible for the creation of every still image the company used, whatever the purpose.
In later years he’d work on developing the creative ideas for photo-stories designed to enhance and demonstrate a wrestler’s character, such as in the “Private Eye” section of WWF Magazine which featured everything from Miss Elizabeth riding on a Kentucky horse range to Jimmy Snuka cliff-diving in Fiji.
During his first couple of years working as a freelancer for WWF, Buchanan found the wrestler were “very protective. I’d only be working two or three days at a time, so I never went backstage.” Once he became a full timer and going out on road trips, “backstage became my space too and I’d often be there before the talent. They started to recognise me and even play to me during the shows.”
At times this could be terrifying. In an early experience, Randy Savage went after Buchanan during a match and repeatedly shouted at him for taking photographs of Miss Elizabeth — something that was specifically part of his shooting remit. It took several days, including some hardcore kayfabing from local promoter and WWF on-screen president Jack Tunney, before Buchnan discovered Savage was simply playing to his character and wanted to turn the ‘confrontation’ into a nightly routine.
On another occasion, referee Dave Hebner was doing a schtick where heels would put their feet on the ropes for unfair leverage but remove them before being caught in the act. To wind up the crowd up even further, when Hebner saw the ropes shaking he would point the finger at Buchanan, falsely accuse him of grabbing the ropes, and order him to stop while threatening to have him removed. It became a fun nightly routine until Hebner overplayed his “anger” with Buchanan, leading to a security guard legitimately ejecting the photographer from the building.
It wasn’t until he began working full-time for the company that Buchanan really got versed in the often bizarre ways of the WWF however. “My first road trip was for a Saturday Night’s Main Event in Seattle. We were flying on a jumbo and the whole crew was there including Vince McMahon, and I didn’t know what to expect or what the etiquette would be.
“During the flight I was sitting in my coach seat and Vince walks down the aisle from business class and as he passed me he dropped a man’s black shoe and a lady’s white shoe into my lap. I had absolutely no idea what to do or say, so for some reason I eventually decided to put the lady’s shoe in my bag and leave the man’s shoe in the bathroom for somebody else to find.
“A few minutes later the flight attendant announces over the PA that ‘If anyone has lost a man’s black shoe, please let us know as we’ve found it. Also, if anyone has found a woman’s white shoe, please let us know.’ Immediately everyone from the wrestling crew burst out laughing.
“I later found out that there was a running deal where if anyone from WWF fell asleep on a plane, they’d have one of their shoes taken away. I kept hold of that white shoe and always carried it around in my bag, just as a reminder to myself that I wasn’t working for IBM.”
It was only a few weeks later that Buchanan took what would become arguably his most famous image, a picture of the entire crowd at the Pontiac Silverdome for WrestleMania III that not only captured the magnitude of the occasion, but has even served as “evidence” in the never-ending debate about exactly how many people were in attendance.
He recalls that it wasn’t that difficult or complex a picture to create. “I was at the Silverdome a day in advance so I had a lot of time to walk around and plan it. It was a simple concept: a shot from the worst seat in the house! I actually took several similar shots from different places, but that one came out the most dramatic.
“I didn’t realise it would become so iconic when I took it. In fact it was another shot I took after the main event, with Hogan on the modified golf truck holding up the title, that I ‘knew’ right away would be the great picture.”
Buchanan also has a theory on why the crowd, which may not have been that much bigger than many recent WrestleManias in reality, looked so enormous on film. “The way the roof of the dome was constructed meant it let in so much natural light, so you could see every seat in the pictures.”
As he began working full time, Buchanan’s schedule extended from TV tapings to taking in many house shows as well. At this time it wasn’t uncommon for the same wrestlers to face one another for weeks at a time, settling into a predictable routine. “I’d know how the match was going to go before hitting the ring. I’d really not even be thinking about the flow of the match. It got a bit tired when you’d see the same match 20 times.”
Surprisingly Buchanan names Randy Savage — well known in the industry for planning his WrestleMania III classic with Ricky Steamboat down to the individual moves — as somebody who’d vary the in-ring action on house show runs. “Occasionally if two guys liked each other, they’d try to change things up. But Savage always kept his matches pretty fresh and tried hard to make them different. He was about the only one who’d do that consistently.”
It’s not the action itself that provided Buchanan’s favourite live event memory, though. “On a show in Kuwait, Owen Hart was working with Tiger Ali Singh, who was not exactly as good as he thought he was or as good as they wanted him to be. They were not having good matches and on this night Owen just decided to give up and started calling out spots at the top of his voice without trying to hide it!”
In the era before Monday Night Raw, the set-up of house shows meant Buchanan had to take a very different approach to shooting matches. “TV shows were mainly matches with main eventers against nobodies, so you were concentrating on getting action shots highlighting the star. At house shows it was stars against stars, but that was actually a problem because we could never show top talent in a negative light, so we couldn’t use a picture of one guy doing a move to another. That meant we were really restrained to taking generic shots focusing on just one guy, which we tended to use for portfolios.”
Meanwhile the TV taping setup presented is own problems. Buchanan explained that, counter-intuitively, wrestlers focusing their performance to one side of the ring for TV didn’t simplify the photographer’s job. “It was quite the opposite: because they were directed to the hard camera, you couldn’t stand on that side of the ring because you’d constantly be in shot. In effect, standing there would be like standing in front of an actor on a stage, so we had to shoot from the side. In the end, I found the best thing was to actually set up a position next to the hard camera and zoom in.”
To make things even more complicated, there was an exception to the rule about not shooting star wrestlers on the defensive. Once a month, Buchanan and company were tasked with covering a star vs star match in depth for a WWF Magazine feature titled ‘Battle of the Titans’ which had an accompanying match report. “Because those matches usually took place at television tapings, which were otherwise mainly star vs nobody matches, we’d have to use two different camera set-ups, one of which I thought of as the ‘storytelling position’.”
While the in-ring (and out of ring) style became more athletic, fast-paced and acrobatic over the years, Buchanan says he didn’t find photography became more difficult. “I think that’s because it was a slow metamorphis rather than suddenly changing. Also, when I started, everything seemed very fast-paced because I wasn’t used to it. Over time it became more familiar, so even if was really faster, it seemed like it was the same.”
From both an artistic and technical point, the biggest development in Buchanan’s WWF career was the introduction of live weekly broadcasts featuring fresh matches. “Because we didn’t see the same matches over and over, shooting them became more like covering a sporting event where you had to react to what was happening.”
He also recalls that when wrestlers really kicked into gear at pay-per-views, he would occasionally get caught up in the drama. “During the Shawn Michaels-Razor Ramon ladder match, I was sat shooting from the hard camera position and every so often I’d realise I was forgetting to take any pictures and had my camera down!”
Contrastingly, once the TV cameras were off, the production crew often found things tiresome. “If the good guy didn’t win the last match on TV, they’d usually do something after the show to send the crowd home happy and we’d have to just sit there waiting till we could start packing up. The one exception was with the Rock: we’d just sit and watch, totally mesmerised as he worked the crowd.”
The TV setup had other benefits for Buchanan, who eventually began wearing a headset in the same way as the video camera operators. “I was able to hear from the director when he was warning that a big move or incident was coming up, so I could make sure to be in the right place ready to shoot it, without getting in the way of the TV crew” The headset also allowed him to take on another role, following instructions from the director to make sure that a cameraman and/or his equipment was moved out of the way if they risked blocking either a wrestler’s path or an important camera angle.
The TV product becoming more technically sophisticated would eventually make life more difficult backstage where Buchanan would take advantage of the entire wrestling roster being in one place on TV days and work on filling up the stills library. “We’d try to get new shots of wrestlers at least once every six months to keep up to date with their gimmick and appearance changes. About 80 to 90 percent of the backstage shots were totally generic, while only 10 to 20 were product specific [such as a wrestler modelling new merchandise] so it didn’t matter what order we did them in.
“However, with guys like Austin and Undertaker we started having to do specific shots which used special lighting to fit their characters. That meant much more planning around their schedules because once you’d set up for those shots, you couldn’t shoot anything else while you were waiting.”
Looking back on his WWF career, Buchanan is most proud of his Silverdome crowd shot, an image of Hulk Hogan midway through tearing his shirt, and a picture of Ricky Steamboat under the 1991 “Dragon” gimmick: “I caught him right at the peak of blowing fire, which really stands out because I’m not sure how I did it!”
However, it’s not a shot of a wrestler that Buchanan cites as his most notable work. “Sunny came to me with the idea of collaborating on what would be known as diva shots, which was really a new genre. We went out to Rochester, New York to try something new with some glamour shots, which we pulled off even though the company was going through financial trouble and there wasn’t much in the budget.
“Those are the shots that went up online and went viral, leading to Sunny famously being ‘the most downloaded celebrity on AOL’. That triggered Vince to think about portraying the women in wrestling in a different way, as more sexual beings, so that’s something that really stands out from my career.”
