Every picture tells a story
Sally Loane, Sydney Morning Herald Monday 24 July, 2000

Lorrie Graham and I first met at the airport one morning in the mid ‘80s. We were heading out to a cattle property in Western Queensland to do a story on the wool industry legend Sir William Gunn. I had no idea what a famous photographer from the Big Smoke would look like – a glamorous babe who’d want me to carry her lights ? Or the more familiar breed of newspaper , a rumpled figure in a fisherman’s vest stuffed with rolls of film and batteries?

The young woman who greeted me was wearing moleskin trousers, R.M.Williams boots, a (very stylish) oilskin and a mane of straight glossy black hair. She looked as though she could saddle up and muster a paddock of feral steers before lunch. Sir William was putty in front of her lens.

Over the following decade, as we worked together on stories around the country and overseas, I realised that Graham could slip into the skin of any story.

During a press conference at a National Party meeting in Queensland, Joh Bjelke-Petersen paused in the middle of a rambling discourse and spoke directly to the photographer who was lying on the floor in the space before him, watching him through her camera.

“You’re as still as a cat,” said Sir Joh. “You’re watching me like a cat.”

The old boy was remarkably perceptive.

Graham is responsible for some of the most potent and memorable photos of our contemporary politicians – the insect-like Bob Hawke with two microphone heads obliterating his eyes, the Paul Keating peering over Blues Brothers sunglasses, the John Howard on the 1997 campaign trail, his smile disappearing behind a giant lectern, relentlessly pursued by a reckless Bjelke-Petersen, whose smug grin was captured by her camera one chilly afternoon at Canberra’s Lakeside hotel as he announced “The Coalition is over!”

There is no better photojournalist in this country. Graham quietly insinuates herself between the journalist and the subject, always waiting for the image that expresses the story better than words. She has photographed the beautiful and powerful, the plain, the overweight, the bizarre and the ridiculous, always preserving their dignity and their humanity, but pricking pomposity when required…

Her latest , and perhaps best work, is a new exhibition and book, Sydneysiders, on display at the Museum of Sydney as part of the Olympics Arts Festival. Graham spent two years trawling Sydney, watching people like a cat, getting under the skins of their lives.

I challenge anyone to leave her photographs without smiling. The Goth family behind their white picket fence in Newtown; the victorious King’s School GPS rugby side; Aneta and Bill Hristov’s 20 hour wedding party; the gorgeous Cronulla Sharks’ cheer squad; the nippers on Coogee beach; the kids at the Everleigh Street Gym in Redfern; Drag racing at Eastern Creek and thoroughbred racing at Randwick. We’re all here, warts and dimples and pouts and grins.

My favourite is the ballroom dancers on the forecourt of the Opera House, silhouetted against the great span of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House sails. This is the Strictly Ballroom of Sydney images, a photograph so full of exuberance and humour and sequins it nearly lifts off the page........