Gritty snapshot of a city in all its colourful complexity
Robert McFarlane, Sydney Morning Herald Friday, August 18, 2000

Lorrie Graham’s great gift as a photographer is her humanity. The closeness she gets, physically and emotionally, to her subjects radiates from the images in her project Sydneysiders, on exhibition at the Museum of Sydney.

The warm rapport this ebullient photographer established with her subjects was tangible. Like many photojournalists (documentary photographers who use their medium to tell a story), Graham is fond of intimate , confronting images in which the subject’s eyes poignantly engage with the lens.

More interesting, however, were Graham’s photographs in which the subject was observed, oblivious to the camera. In her image of the rain-soaked cheerleaders at a State of Origin football match, this photographer came so close you felt she could have reached out and touched them. Yet Graham was able to photograph without being noticed. The resulting image is poignant, amusing and, in documentary terms, priceless.

This is a fine, intimate trick for any photographer to master, and Graham repeats it regularly throughout this exhibition and the much larger selection of images from the accompanying book.

Sydneysiders grew from a simple conversation Graham had with Leo Schofield three years ago. “Leo [just] said go out and do a snapshot of Sydney,” Graham said. “He gave me the space and time I wouldn’t normally have had.”

She began photographing last year, commissioned by Historic Houses of Australia and the Olympics Arts Festival. She was conscious from the beginning that Sydneysiders was “a bit of a gift.”

“ It was the only way a photographer like me would get to do a project like this. We don’t get arts grants. The Visual Arts Board [of the Australia Council] supports photo-based art rather than photojournalism, which they see as an old art form.”

This exhibition and book reveal Sydney in all its gritty, suburban, multicultural complexity. At an Eastern Creek drag race Graham photographed an intense, beautiful young woman, Maria Inlesias, waiting by her boyfriend’s restored 1970 Falcon. Contrast this with elegant Abbotsleigh Year 12 graduate Lucy Reynolds at a school dinner at the Regent Hotel, and Sydney’s cultural span was measurable – with, one suspects, neither woman envying the other.

Identifying each person photographed for Sydneysiders was crucial for Graham. “When I started this project I wanted to name as many [of my subjects] as possible and take on some part of their lives. I din’t want a sea of anonymous faces.”

There is little in this exhibition and book that would satisfy lovers of purely picturesque Sydney. The Harbour Bridge and Opera House are rarely seen, with the city’s beaches and suburbs playing only secondary roles to Graham’s closely watched citizens.

“Next time, I would do much more with the physical landscape,” she said, “but [here] I found that the people’s stories were enough. A lot of the people [photographed] have become friends that I will have for the rest of my life.”