The Shot

by Gary Ramage

  The same thing happened when Kevin Rudd was on his way out the first time. The media scrum waited outside the party room, and I snuck into his office and got a shot of him as he walked in – totally against the rules. It’s about finding the best position. It’s a bit cheeky, sure, but you soon discover that most human beings prefer the control and dignity of having one person photograph them to being assailed by a pack. If you handle it properly, the subject will always take the opportunity to compose themselves and deal with a single photographer. So long as it’s me, I’m okay with that. I still believe it’s much easier to beg for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission. This has been my mantra for some time.

  It was a very steep learning curve for the first eighteen months, and I got through it with the help of photographers like Mark McCormack and picture editor Andrew Darby. Darbs was a classic tabloid man. Blond and slender in build – but not in attitude – Darbs was a schemer and we had a lot of strategy sessions at the Aurora Hotel, around the corner from the Holt Street headquarters of News Ltd in Surry Hills. About the only non-tabloid feature of Darbs was his choice of drink. While the rest of us sipped on beers, the staff at the hotel had a drink on the menu called the Darby Chardy: chardonnay with ice cubes in it, just the way Darbs liked it.

  After a couple of weeks with Mark McCormack, I was on my own, doing photo calls with no one looking over my shoulder. I was quickly accepted by the News Ltd photographers, but not by the Fairfax photographers, who didn’t trust my military background. The News guys saw that I had a work ethic and I delivered. My cheeky habit of scheming and getting around the rules also worked well at the Tele. The tabloid photographers were always thinking up a smarter (or sneakier) way to get a shot that was not allowed, and this culture was a perfect fit for me.

  Along with some of the work practices I had to learn, I had to get up to speed with Canon. The army had used Nikon since the 1970s and News Ltd was Canon. I was worried about the transition, especially since digital was only just getting started and there were a few different file formats bouncing around. But apart from some quirky dial differences, Canon and Nikon are virtually identical in terms of what their professional cameras and lenses can do.

  The Tele was both a good cultural fit for me and also a culture shock. Suddenly I was going to work without a uniform, and a shift was entirely unpredictable. In the army, we’d always plan. But on newspapers, every morning there was a list of photo calls, usually on a whiteboard at the picture desk, and you went out to your call at the appointed time. But while you were waiting for the criminal to leave the court, or waiting for the chairman of the board to deliver his address, you’d be getting calls from the picture desk that always started with the words, ‘Where are you?’ The tabloid papers cover just about everything with small photographic staffs who work under insane pressure. The culture is ‘go’. That is, there’s a smash on the Harbour Bridge. Go! A pensioner was bashed and robbed. Go! A politician is about to resign. Go!

  That was the biggest shock. The all-day, round-the-clock, frantic, panicked energy of The Daily Telegraph, a culture which is funny from the outside but entirely serious and all-consuming on the inside. I had to learn how to handle a different kind of fatigue from the one you get in the military. Newspaper photographers don’t do much sitting. We don’t do lunch, and we don’t sit around talking about our feelings. When we talk, it’s about gigs and equipment and who shot a front-page. And we get really sore feet. Not only that, but there’s the camera bags. The average newspaper photographer’s bag weighs around twenty kilograms. The rule on papers is that the photographer can’t go back without the picture, and ‘equipment failure’ is not a valid excuse. So we carry spares of everything: typically, two camera bodies, three or four lenses (a big telephoto if you’re doing sport or chasing someone), extra batteries, flash units, laptop and even a back-up phone. This last one is crucial: you can never be off the air if you work as a photographer for a tabloid newspaper. Your phone always has to work and always has to be on, and a flat battery is no excuse. It doesn’t matter where you are or the time of day. You have to be ready to take that call and answer that perennial question: Where are you?

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have been pushing so hard for this career change. I had more than enough problems on the home front. Mel and I had been in trouble ever since I left the army and moved into our apartment in Sydney. It was a case of Gary’s here now, but he’s not here. I’d withdrawn into myself, worried about my readiness for civvy life after spending all my adult life to date in the military. I was drinking too much, I was remote, and as soon as Darbs threw me the chance at the Tele, I was off like a scalded cat, as deep into the tabloid media world as you could go. Sometimes you think you’re running towards something, but you’re really running away. Mel did nothing wrong – she tolerated me and the way I was and held out hope that the Good Gary would return.

  13

  A New Career, a Tsunami

  I’d been at the Tele for fourteen months when the tsunami hit Aceh, Thailand and Sri Lanka on Boxing Day 2004. I was up early when it struck, and I lobbied hard to be sent. In the first place, the Tele was going to take wire pictures and send in their reporter, Charles Miranda. But when the discussion turned to how many Aussies were over there and how many stories and pics there should be, they decided to send a photographer for the paper, and luckily it was me.

  I flew into Phuket, where I met Charles. We started by following the major devastation wire stories, but actually, there was only so much you could do with that. After a day, we realised we had to forge our own portfolio. The devastation was so immense, the story so big, that what we had to do was tell the stories of the people – and not just the Aussies whose holidays were wrecked. So we travelled around a bit in a rented car, and I took the pictures of three babies taking a bath in a bucket, and Charles got the stories of being washed halfway to the mountains when the tsunami came through. We covered the mass morgues and the body bags cooking in the sun, and the mothers’ fight for clean water. We went for the big devastation story but peppered it with the personal stories and pictures, which is what the Tele loves to run.

  PHOTO BY GARY RAMAGE; COURTESY NEWSPIX

  Sometimes the small, personal shots tell the larger story.

  We worked hard and took ourselves to exhaustion and back. It was a dirty, humid, hot environment and the smell of decomposing bodies – not just people but all the animals too – was quite terrible. The last time I’d smelled that was Kosovo, and I can tell you that the sweet smell of putrescence can turn even me into a vegetarian for a while.

  The gig was over by 2 January and it was the hardest work I’d ever done with a camera. I barely put down my gear and I only sat down to eat or sleep. It was hot and smelly with all sorts of crap underfoot, most of which would slice your foot open if you stood on it. There was a lot of confusion: homeless locals looking for their families, hungry people looking for food, thirsty people looking for clean water. Soldiers pulled up in their trucks and were overwhelmed. Army engineers offloaded bulldozers to clear debris and dig graves. Medical teams arrived in flattened areas where the smell of human flesh was getting high, and tried to head off the threat of diseases. If we weren’t on the phone to the Tele, we were chasing a story; and if we weren’t doing interviews and photographs, we were filing from the laptops, Charles finalising stories and me sending pics and captions from the sat-phone data connection. Sleep was a four-or five-hour luxury before we started moving again.

  We ranged all over the Phuket peninsula and around to the province of Krabi on the mainland. The pictures you normally see of these places are of beaches or resorts, but actually it’s mostly rural, and some of the sights and stories we were recording were heartbreaking. Phuket was fucked; the crops and plantations were flattened, the resorts had washed away, the fishing fleets were wrecked, the livestock was gone and hundreds of thousands of people were homeless. Because the devastation was so widespread, it took the police and military
days and even weeks to reach some communities.

  I learned some lessons on this, my first overseas gig with a newspaper.

  First, always have a bag packed and always have your passport up-to-date.

  Second, make sure your gear is functioning properly before you leave Australia – you can’t get new camera straps or fresh batteries in a conflict or disaster zone. Back then, the overseas assignment kit for News photographers was two Canon bodies, three lenses, two flash units, a big clunky laptop and a satellite phone with data cord for sending images from the laptop. The Canons were only eight megapixels and there was no video capability. But they were reliable, took a good photo, had a long battery life and weren’t as heavy as some competing brands. Looking after the gear was all- important; you can’t see the shot and have your camera or flash die in front of you. So after that gig I always had my batteries on the charger at the end of each day and always downloaded my shots to storage. You do that so when you pick up your gear in the morning, it’s ready to go. And when you get off a plane, you’re ready as soon as they open the door: you don’t have to be taken to the hotel to recharge your stuff.

  Thirdly, always stay focused on doing the best stories for your readers rather than chasing wire material. In the really big disasters, it’s the small, personal stories that best illustrate the drama.

  A fourth big lesson to come out of the tsunami had to do with footwear. Photographers tend to think about this more than the writers, perhaps because we’re on our feet most of the day and footwear matters to us. But in a scene of carnage like the Boxing Day tsunami, you need shoes that will stay in one piece. In Phuket, there was so much stuff on the ground that a pair of street shoes would have been shredded in no time, and then what do you do? I wore army boots, but after seeing that the other photographers wore technical hiking boots, I switched to them for subsequent gigs. They’re comfortable, they’re tough and they dry quickly.

  One of the things I did introduce to the newspaper world was the camera harness. In late 2003 I’d connected up with my great mate Rob Griffith. Rob was ex-military as well and was now chief photographer at Associated Press in the Sydney office. He had a sideline business, Griffgear, producing custom-made bits of gear for photographers: photojournalist bags, pouches and computer sun screens, and so on – the kind of thing we needed but no one made back in the day. I told him I wanted to solve the problem of trying to carry two cameras around, one over each shoulder. It wasn’t just the annoyance of the cameras slipping off my shoulders; there’d been times at court when I needed to drop the cameras very quickly and not have them bumping around me. I gave him my old army pistol sidearm shoulder holster and he went to work. Using an industrial sewing machine, he stitched up a harness to which I could attach a camera with a quick- release connector. Rob put two of these together, so I had a quick release system for two cameras, and when I walked around each camera was held alongside my ribs under either armpit. They couldn’t slip off and the cameras were evenly weighted across my shoulders. Best of all, I could jump in a car and start driving and not have to be ripping cameras off and finding a place to put them. I could drive with the cameras held fairly much in place. It’s funny how technology goes in photography. When I first started wearing my harness at the Tele in 2004, the other photographers laughed and called me a wanker. I told Rob he should patent the idea but he laughed. Now they’re commercially produced by another company worldwide and everyone has one.

  Covering the tsunami was my first assignment for newspapers in the stuff I love: the conflict and disaster zones. A number of things were different to my military career, but basically, I was good at this and it was what I wanted to do.

  I’d kicked off my second career.

  14

  The Hunted and the Hunter

  Some press photography is a cross between serious and paparazzi. Through early 2005 I was introduced to papping when I was assigned to ‘Adler watch’. This meant taking photos of the former managing director of FAI Insurance, Rodney Adler, as he negotiated his way through the charges brought against him following the royal commission into the collapse of HIH Insurance.

  Adler had encouraged HIH to buy FAI for a really good sum of money, and a couple of years after the purchase HIH had gone bust and the finger was being pointed at FAI, with allegations made about what Adler had said to a journalist regarding his holdings in HIH. It was complex white-collar stuff, which is the serious part. And then there’s the pap part. That involves me camped out at the bottom of Adler’s driveway in the fancy Sydney suburb of Vaucluse trying to photograph him and, if I missed my shot, following him across the city. Which happened many times in the months of his trial and sentencing.

  Adler was catnip to the Sydney media, and he was always a candidate – up there with Kerry Packer and Russell Crowe – for a front page at the Tele. Although few photographers understood the exact nature of Adler’s wrongdoing, we understood he was tall, good-looking and rich, with a glamorous wife. And he’d been tricky with money. So it was open season.

  It’s just that Adler did not like being followed. I remember some of the chases he led us on through the back streets of the Eastern Suburbs and across the city. At one point I thought I could talk to him, man to man, and I stood in the middle of his driveway as the gate swung open and he charged down this steep driveway in his Mercedes 4x4. I was going to say to him, Rodney, mate, give us a shot to take back to the newsroom and we’ll leave you alone. It sounded reasonable when I said it to myself, but he accelerated and I had to jump out of the way as he raced past.

  His antagonism may have had something to do with the long-range pic I took of him and his wife Lyndi strolling outside their mansion. Perhaps including the wife was too much. But it was a good get.

  So, he was annoyed about having his house staked out? Fair enough. I came at it from a different angle and I started waiting for him in the city, at his offices in Australia Square. I was thinking in terms of him stopping for a coffee, going to the gym, going for a swim at the beach. But he never deviated from his customary route. He went straight home and up that steep drive. One time, it must have been a bad day with the lawyers, because I picked up his tail from Australia Square and he was so agitated by my presence that he began to drive erratically. I stayed with him, hoping he was okay, and then we got on to William Street, heading east. We were coming up to a red light and I was pondering a quick shot through my open passenger window as Adler sat beside me. I thought we might get a meltdown picture for the camera. But he didn’t stop – he hit the gas and went sailing through the red light on what was a fairly busy William Street. I called it off and when I got back to the newsroom I told them I was concerned about the Adler story because I thought someone might get hurt.

  I try to tell people this: yes, there are things I won’t do. And sometimes photographers – as a pack – make a call that our picture editors don’t want us to make. Throughout the early 2010s, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, Peter Slipper, was being pursued for misuse of parliamentary expenses – basically, using Cabcharge dockets reserved for official business to do the rounds of the Canberra wineries. We pursued every opportunity to get pics for the picture desk in Sydney, but there are limits placed on photographers around Parliament House and we had to wait for his court appearances. When Slipper was found guilty at the Canberra Magistrates Court, he was followed by such a swarm of media that I missed my prime position. Slipper found a taxi and quickly got in, so I whipped around the other side of the cab, where I opened the driver’s door, kneeled across the driver and got a beautiful shot of Peter Slipper, right up close. Wearing something between a smile and a grimace, he said to the driver, ‘Okay, we can go now.’ But the months took their toll on Slipper, and by the time he appeared for sentencing in September 2014, he was clearly unwell. He was sentenced to community service and this time we followed him: he went straight to a pub – the Uni Bar on London Circuit – and just sat there in his sunnies. He was in anot
her world and so we called it off. We all stowed our cameras and walked away. The aim is to report the news, not to destroy people.

  Anyway, the Adler job was my first pursuit assignment and I was glad to discover that I did have my limits.

  ***

  My second such assignment followed hot on the heels of the first. I was in a backyard in the western suburbs of Sydney with a 200mm lens. My line of sight extended across a suburban fence, and into the back door of a house that belonged to the brother of Andrew Chan.

  This was April 2005 and a Tele journalist and I were following the family of one of the Bali Nine – the nine Australians who’d been busted in Bali trying to smuggle over eight kilograms of heroin from Indonesia to Australia. The Indonesian cops had pounced on them at their hotel as they were strapping the bags of heroin to their bodies, and they’d arrested the two ringleaders, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.

  So there I was, waiting for a Chan family shot, when the phone rang.

  ‘Where are you?’ said Darbs.