AUSTRALIAN premier war photographer and Millicent High School alumnus Gary Ramage will detail life in a war zone at a meet and greet session on Friday.
The Millicent Gallery will host the triple Walkley Award winner at an evening session where people will have an opportunity to hear the background of Mr Ramage’s confronting photographs from the frontline.
More than 40 of Mr Ramage’s images taken during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts are currently on display at the gallery.
Mr Ramage said the exhibition and subsequent meet and greet session were hatched earlier this year with former school friend and Wattle Range Mayor Peter Gandolfi.
“We were talking and Pete suggested that we could try to put on an exhibition,” he said.
“Millicent is not a metropolis and it does not always have a lot of things available.
“The idea was to show what life is like in places that are very different.”
The former Millicent High School student joined the Australian Defence Force in 1985, serving as an Australian army photographer for 15 years before becoming the army’s chief photographer.
“I started at Millicent in 1980 and left in ’83, and I studied a bit of photography at school with Mr Gates,” he said.
“I moved to Western Australia and joined the army in 1985, a couple of years later I joined the Australian army public relations service and I was with them for 15 odd years.”
During his time with the army, Mr Ramage documented conflicts across the world, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Somalia, Bosnia, East Timor and Bougainville.
“Everything I have done, I have tried to do embedded with troops,” he said.
“Being ex-military, I have always had this fascination with the Diggers’ story.
“I have carried that idea through with News Corp by always trying to tell the story of the Australian Digger.”
Mr Ramage said the task of recording horrific events was not without its risks, adding there had been a few situations where he had come under fire.
“The shot is very important because that’s what I’m employed to do, but you do not want to stand up in the middle of fire fight,” he said.
“It does not effect me too much when I’m on the job, normally it’s when I have finished the job or activity and the realisation that you survived that incident.
“It’s just a matter of talking about it.”
Mr Ramage left the army in 2004 and has spent the past 13 years covering federal politics for all titles across News Corp, including three federal election campaigns.
“Political photography is very different, but it is very challenging,” he said.
“You have to get pictures of guys in suits day in and day out, and you have to make the pictures look different.”
In 2015, Mr Ramage was awarded the prestigious Walkley Press Photographer of the Year accolade for news reporting, as well as winning gold in the photograph of the year for “Ice Nation”, a confronting image of a man in an ice-induced emergency.
“I paired up with Paul Toohey and spent a month travelling around to cover the ice epidemic,” he said.
“We were very lucky we had a fantastic medical team in Perth who granted us access to the emergency department and we were lucky I was allowed to have those images.”
Despite the risk involved, Mr Ramage said he was fortunate to be employed as a photographer.
“I do it for the love of actually being able to take pictures,” he said.
“I am one of the luckiest people I know because I get paid to do my hobby.”
