Michael Rayner

Michael Rayner was offered a cadetship with the Age on New Year’s Eve in 1968. 250 applicants were battling it our for four positions, and he came up with the right answer to the most important question. When asked:

”It’s 9:00 pm, there’s a train crash at Spencer Street rail yards. We need pictures by 10:00 pm. You arrive but find its cordoned off and you are told by police not to go there. What do you do?”

”I would find away around the barricade to try to get the picture. Getting the picture is the most important thing. I would presume you would support me in that.”

Rayner began working for the Age and then Fairfax, more generally, in 1968 and says he was lucky to be there when ‘it was setting the agenda for Melbourne media’. The paper through its weight behind popular campaigns to improve the city of Melbourne, including the ‘Give the Yarra a Go’ campaign. ‘Southbank and Crown are a direct result of that campaign,’ he says.

An editor who had a lasting impression on him was Michael Davie, who had worked on The Observer in the United Kingdom. ‘He opened up the whole world of newspaper photography,’ says Rayner. He talked to the photographers, and began to use pictures bigger and more prominently. He opposed public relations shoots, and told the photographers to go out and get ‘the photo behind the photo’.

Throughout his lengthy career with the Age and associated Fairfax publications, Rayner was official photographer for the Brisbane Commonwealth Games, the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games Cultural Program and the VFL; he has also covered World Cup cricket in Australia, India and Pakistan. In 1992 he travelled to Northern Iraq where he undertook a powerful photographic essay on landmine victims and refugees. He has worked as an official photographer for International Arts Festivals.

Rayner has published three books: Ticket to Ride, a reflection of life and characters around the Australian continent by train, Caribbean Odyssey, a celebration of cricket and life in the West Indies and Contact Renewed; Australia versus the new South Africa, an account of life following the resumption of Test cricket after apartheid.

He has returned to Melbourne, having lived and worked in Hobart, Tasmania, for several years.

Sources:

• Kathleen Whelan, Photography of the Age: Newspaper Photography in Australia, Brolga Publishing, Melbourne, 2014, pp 94-101.
• Michael Rayner Photography, http://http://www.michaelraynerphotography.com.au/