Sohail Hasnie Photography

Since 1975

Where it started

It began with my mother’s Agfa in 1975. Two years later I had a Zenit TTL of my own — the self-portrait below is the first frame I made with it, in a mirror, working out what the camera did.

The slides survive. Boats on the river, fan palms, a beach at dusk, the Twelve Apostles before two of them fell into the sea. Fifty years on, the subjects have not changed much.

The first frame from the Zenit, about 1977.
Among the earliest slides I kept.
Self-portrait, a river in the seventies.
Port Campbell, before 2005. The stack at left is believed to be the Apostle that collapsed on 3 July 2005. Two have fallen since; seven remain.

What came after was not a photography career. It was thirty-eight years in energy — twenty-two of them at a multilateral development bank — across sixteen countries, with a camera in the bag the whole way. Almost everything in Galleries was made in the margins of that work.