Wordless Stories
Joanna Mendelssohn, The Bulletin November 10, 1992

Lorrie Graham’s photographs avoid arty pitfalls while delivering truths right between the eyes.

Photojournalism sits in a curious position between reportage and art photography. The photojournalist owns the eyes that see Bob Hawke as a blind man, and has the wit to photograph him with eye-patch microphones in an image that will forever sum up his prime ministerial career.

The photojournalist is also the person who catches Gorbachev at the very moment he looks directly at the camera, letting the subject speak directly to the viewer through all time. But the photojournalist must, above all, compose and select her image so that it grabs the imagination without the self-indulgence of “high art” photography.

The value of Lorrie Graham’s photographs is that so many of them have become the images that encapsulate our memories of faces and occasions. Rupert Murdoch, Yothu Yindi and Jimmy Barnes – contemporary culture in fine detail...and Leo Schofield will never look the same after Graham’s photograph of him with his mum.

More than the individual portraits, there are the events. Graham appears to have led a privileged existence as an observer of many of the great events in recent history. There is Malcolm Fraser, windblown at a Liberal Party rally in late 1975, with William Charles Wentworth lurking in the background behind then-NSW Premier Tom Lewis. The rumpled figure of Fraser is balanced by the smooth Lewis : the incumbent versus the man who would be legitimate.

There is a land rights claim in the Northern Territory, and the tragic aftermath of the Gulf War. Graham was also fortunate enough to be in Fiji for the coups and has caught the machismo of the posturing Rabuka. The Fijian military may pose with their guns, but their features look softened and almost casual against the tension of the Nicaraguan women guerillas.

And this is where Graham’s ability to see and understand is so important. A lesser photographer would simply have shown soldiers; the way she has chosen the images and the very angles of the shots show the essential difference between the life-and-death struggle in Nicaragua, and the lesser events in Fiji.

Removed from their context of newsprint and placed in the semi-precious space of an art gallery, it is possible to see how inspired some of Graham’s images really are. They do not need the words of journalists to give them meaning. Any viewer will be able to read the relentless sea of tents from Iraq as part of the never ending 20th century procession of refugees, or smudged, bleak face of Lady Mary Fairfax as a private tragedy turned public farce. And there are no images more telling than the sunburnt photographs of the new generation of poor in what was once profitable rural Australia.

But even more telling than these images of the pages of yesterday’s press, there are Graham’s photographs of social comment. There is the leather-clad Dyke on Bike, whose posturing almost out swaggers Rabuka, and a glorious photograph of an aboriginal family driving home in their car...........