Photography - Nikon-Walkley Press Photographer of the Year - Photographic Essay - Winner

Kate Geraghty, The Sydney Morning Herald, "John Elliott"

Kate Geraghty first met Dr John Elliott and his wife Angelika in their Sydney home, where they asked her to help chronicle his final days.

Elliott was dying of bone-marrow cancer, in constant pain and determined to die with dignity. Geraghty joined the couple as they travelled to Switzerland to use the Dignitas clinic, where John was legally euthanased.

Geraghty’s series of photographs are a painfully intimate insight into a man’s dying wish and a wife’s crippling grief.

She captures it with compassion and consummate skill, moving the viewer with the simplest of details without ever seeming to intrude on the Elliotts’ quiet dignity.

Geraghty was named Nikon-Walkley Press Photographer of the Year in 2006, for her photo essay on the conflict in Lebanon and other news images. She began her career in Albury-Wodonga at The Border Mail. Since joining The Sydney Morning Herald in 2001, Geraghty has covered the war in Iraq, the devastation in Aceh from the tsunami in 2004 and other pivotal events throughout the world.

For much of this year Geraghty has been on exchange in Dublin at The Irish Times.

Judges’ comments

Geraghty showed outstanding skill and character in allowing these photographs to tell Elliott’s story. She captured amazingly intimate moments with an awful lot of humanity. It would have been a terribly hard, emotionally draining story to do but she managed to create a set of images that stand as a powerful narrative, even without the article that accompanied them.