1999_07_july_addendum10jul

“”Psst! What are you doing?”

It was Graeme (Bluey) Thomson. He was jerking his head, signalling me to come over to him.

I was a new cadet and had just scored the Sunday shift and we had set off with a list of six picture stories. Bluey had been in the game 15 years. He started as a cadet at 15. I was BA, Day 1.

“”I’ve got to wait for the resolutions of this meeting,” I replied. It was in someone’s house in Aranda and I think it was about aid to Papua New Guinea.

“”Bullshit,” said Bluey. “”We’ve got six jobs and I want to be at a barbie before 3. These do-gooders need you more than you need them. Just get that sheila’s phone number and ring her back. What did you say, Papua New Guinea?”

Bluey organised them around a mask that was on the wall and took his photo.

And so it was into the white Kingswood on to the outer edge of Aranda to take a picture of the first snake of summer. In those pre-ecology-aware days, it meant a picture of some suburban pioneer on the edge of Canberra holding up a dead snake that he killed with a shovel.

Bluey snapped it.

Then to Yarralumla where someone had rung in about an exposed drain.

“”Someone could break a leg falling in that drain,” the Yarralumla-ite berated.

Bluey took the picture. I took diligent notes.

“”Canberra’s got more whingers per acre than anywhere in Australia,” Bluey said. (I still use that expression, though it is now metrically converted.) “”She could have got her hubby to fix that.”

I’ve forgotten the other jobs. Bluey rang the Chief of Staff (from a public phone box) and said we had enough for Page 1, 3 and 7. In those days the editorial and letters were on Page 2 and World News ran from Page 4 to 6.

So we went to the barbie. There were no Breathalyzers then.

The snake was on 1, the drain on 3 and the do-gooders on 7.

There were no bylines then, at least not on the news pages. So no-one knew that I, with my BA in Philosophy, Politics and History had been writing about drains and snakes and that, on news value, PNG went to the back.

Bluey had developed the black-and-white film in no time and returned to the barbie.

Bluey reminded me of the line drawing on the dust jacket of Arthur Boyd’s Australian Ugliness. The dust-jacket figure had a hoicked up shoulder and a beer in hand. Behind were a telegraph pole with wires and a council-trimmed elm tree. Bluey had a laconic acceptance of his environment and recorded it.

He died last week, aged 57. For 30 years he had recorded Canberra in still image.

Canberra is joyous for photographers. The light is exquisite. It comes in low in winter casting long contrasts. In summer it burns — overhead. Then we have the high and mighty. Prime Ministers playing cricket; Governors-General riding bicycles; ministers with pipes, beer in one hand and footy in the other; the mighty made minnows waiting for faceless men; leaders with love’s labour lost, beaten in challenges; purposeful shoulder-padded female ministers swapping sides opportunistically in the corridors of power. Pictures speaking a thousand words.

Do I have to name them?

Bluey captured some of them.

The technology has moved on. No longer do photographers fuddle in brown light over red reversed images under an enlarger, dodging with hands to make the camera record what the eye has seen.

Now the image goes cleanly under fluorescent light into the cathode ray tubes of the computer.

And there is now colour. Oh no, we will never allow colour to determine news value. Bright colours do not a Page One picture make, we chanted in the weeks before the colour presses arrived.

Photographers knew this to be rubbish, including Bluey – whose very name suggests the lie of colour – the importance of image over reality.

Colour was a new element to get an arresting image, in addition to the elements of black and white. There is perspective and angle, often created with lens distortion. The telephoto stacks the elements, removing boring gaps. The wide angle, accentuates the foreground, so Bluey’s snake held up to the camera looks much bigger than the man behind it. Composition and the capture (or recapture) of the moment can be critical.

Nowadays the challenge for the photographer to get an arresting image is much greater. The photographer cannot rely on the mere technical skill of getting the thing in focus and correctly exposed. Automatic cameras do that for everyone. Now any idiot can get a correctly focused and exposed snap.

The technology has changed, and will continue to change. Dark rooms have gone. Film is going to be replaced with digital images recorded on disk.

But to get a good image for the press requires three ingredients which are as essential now as they were in 1972 on my first assignment with Bluey.

The image must tell a story. The photographer must get a rapport or at least some information from the journalist. The photographer must get a rapport with the people being photographed. And the photographer must extract an arresting two-dimensional arrangement from a three dimensional world.

Whether that was from a camera mounted on his helmet in a skydive, amid the steam of a locomotive, or at an interminable parliamentary press conference, Bluey, the press photographer, did that.