Photography / Fotoheide:  A Photographer’s Tale, by Brian Smith. Reviewed by BRIAN ROPE.

Fotoheide: A Photographer’s Tale is about the career of photographer Heide Smith, known in her birthplace, Germany, as Fotoheide.

The book’s introduction uses various words to describe that career – remarkable, extraordinary, fascinating. The book’s author is the photographer’s husband Brian Smith.

How do you present a photographer’s career which began in 1959 and has continued ever since? A career during which she has published 11 books, given workshops and seminars to photographers all over Australia and in six other countries, and judged regularly for various groups, including the Canberra Photographic Society. This book shows that career in a little over 200 pages – a two-page introduction then 32 chapters, each comprising just one page of words followed by a relevant set of black and white images.

The cover design by Nector Graphic Designs features Smith’s 1991 portrait of Josef Gross, an English journalist and photographer

The first chapter shows just three family images, including the photographer’s first portrait of Uncle Albert,  taken in 1951 when she was just 13 and her career had not commenced in the true sense. Then there are chapters about learning to be a photographer, and marriage, motherhood and migration, which set the scene for the diverse career that followed.

The book looks at Australia and Germany (revisited). At industry, government, tradesmen, churches and churchmen, black Australians, the Canberra Raiders, timeless beauty, Cambodia, oyster farmers and much more. The subject matter is diverse. The quality of all the included images is top class.

The words provide key facts about the numerous elements of the fascinating career. So many portraits – both famous people and ordinary folk in their own homes. The story of the Pegasus Riding School for the Disabled in Canberra. Two trips to Cambodia when roadsides were booby trapped, the countryside was littered with thousands of landmines, and trigger-happy guards manned roadblocks.

The Smiths had a difficult task selecting the images used in the book from the many thousands available to them. Choosing just a few from those they selected to illustrate this review was also challenging.

A chapter about the Tiwi people contains just seven of the thousands of images made during Heide’s adventures with those islanders. All seven feature people – young and old. The photographer herself is in two of them; one with her two Tiwi sisters. One is a most delightful casual study of four little children.

The penultimate chapter is titled Hidden Treasures and is about various vintage prints discovered long after they were made. Then the final chapter has no photographs. Rather it is words from a few of many reviews of Heide’s photographs and books over the years of her career. They illustrate wonderfully the way people have responded to this artist’s remarkable career.