‘High pressure and bad language’: Herald trailblazer reflects on celebrated photography career

From Mandela and Murdoch to McEnroe. From sunrise dog walks and Santa taking a tea break to sex education in Port Moresby. From goths and Guns N’ Roses to gridiron players.

Over five decades, Lorrie Graham’s subjects show how rich and varied the life of a photojournalist can be.

Graham, who worked for The Sydney Morning Herald after becoming Fairfax’s first female cadet photographer in 1975, has spent her life capturing compelling moments.

They include insights into subcultures, memorable takes on newsworthy events and bringing home the human consequences of international crises, photographing AIDS orphans in Uganda, Kurdish refugees in Iraq and Australian doctors treating war casualties in Afghanistan.

Graham started taking photos with her first camera at the age of eight. She knew what she wanted to do with her life after getting a book by celebrated Life magazine photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White when she was 14.

“She was the last person to photograph Gandhi alive,” Graham said as an exhibition celebrating her work, Lorrie Graham: Photojournalist, was installed at the State Library of NSW this week.

“She covered the end of World War II. It was the breadth of the stuff that she got to do and it just looked like a most amazing life to me. And it is.”

The exhibition follows the library acquiring Graham’s archive of more than 100,000 photographs and negatives created between 1975 and 2025. Her photographs are also in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, National Library of Australia and Museums of History NSW.

In 2017, she was inducted into the Australian Media Hall of Fame.

When Graham joined Fairfax aged 20, it was a different era: she thinks there were 60 staff photographers – all male except for her – who were driven to jobs in office cars, with film in their cameras. Afterwards, they raced back to office darkrooms to develop black-and-white photos for the next edition.

“As a cadet, you had to mix these big vats of chemicals,” Graham said. “The first year, I think we spent in the dark learning – just doing photo sales and prints – then occasionally they let you out.”

Her early jobs included Dog of the Week, encouraging readers to save dogs on death row at the RSPCA pound, so-called “death knocks” at the home of shocked relatives after fatal car accidents and photographing a “page-three girl” in a bikini for the long-gone afternoon paper The Sun.

Graham said she was never sent on that job again after advising the young model to read Anne Summers’ feminist bestseller Damned Whores and God’s Police.

“It wasn’t easy but because I really wanted to do it so much, you just put up with shit,” she said. “In that environment at that time, there were no words like ‘sexual harassment’ so you just suck it up really. But there were always good people and people who would look out for you.”

Graham’s first page-one photo came after she was diverted on the way to shoot a Miss Australia contestant. It was of two women who had tragically drowned after being washed off the rocks in the eastern suburbs.

“It didn’t have their faces, but the image was quite graphic,” she said.

When she was too junior to “get anything half reasonable”, Graham would go out to shoot in her own time.

“A lot of people don’t realise in newspapers, particularly on dailies, the speed that you have to work,” she said. “It’s all high pressure and bad language.”

After Fairfax, Graham worked for such publications as The Bulletin and The Observer in London then freelanced for decades.

So what makes an indelible news photograph?

“Something that gets imprinted and you’re going to remember for a very long time,” Graham said.

One of her most widely recognised photos is of then prime minister Paul Keating in Ray-Bans in 1993. Graham shot it in her Surry Hills studio, hoping to capture Keating’s “elusive cool”.

“If it’s a one-on-one, there’s a white-knuckles-to-the knees moment,” she said. “I thought I was going to need some sort of prop so I took three pairs of sunglasses. He just picked the Ray-Bans and started playing with them … he took it away.”

Another famous shot that took more calculation was of then Opposition leader Bob Hawke looking bug-eyed, framed by microphones, at the ALP election campaign launch in 1983. Working for the now-gone weekly The National Times, Graham knew she needed something different from the daily news photographs.

“It took a lot of crawling about the floor and three-and-a-half rolls of film to get one frame where the microphones covered Mr Hawke’s eyes,” she said.

Lorrie Graham: Photojournalist opens at the State Library of NSW on Monday.

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