The Photographer
By Mark Rafidi & Paul O’Sullivan
Hawkeye Publishing 2026
Reviewed by Mia Macrossan
Mark Rafidi comes from mixed heritage and his stories explore identity, belonging, and the intricacies of Australian society. Paul O’Sullivan is the illustrator for Gary Crew’s picture books, The Visions of Ichabod X, (Short Listed for The Australian Book Designers Award) Timing the Machine and The Eva Carmichael Story, and The Wreck of the Loch Ard, in addition to collaborating on Rich and Rare which received a notable at The CBCA. His detailed illustrations contain Steampunk-style elements and reflect Paul’s fascination with the silent films of the early years of cinema and a lifelong obsession with the 1930s.
With The Photographer they have created an impressive work that lingers long in the memory, raising questions about our understanding and experience of war in its many forms. As an army sweeps through a town, a war photographer falls in with them. At first, the camera is there to bear witness to the atrocities of war. But as time progresses, the photographer begins to question almost everything.
Rafidi’s text is spare and atmospheric augmented by O’Sullivan’s powerful images. ‘The town fell quiet. The wind breathed. Buildings creaked. Then the soldiers came.’
O’Sullivan says of his work on this book: As an illustrator, my goal with this book was to construct a unique “Third Narrative”—where the text and the visuals run as two separate, parallel stories that marry at the end into a glorious whole. Set firmly in a 1930s backdrop, the story explores the weight of conflict through the lens of trauma, inspired by author Mark Rafidi’s family history of fleeing the Balkans War and my own history of Plymouth post world war two.
For the young boy in the story, photographs are not physical prints; they are actually his memories. The entire book was executed purely in graphite (though many mistake it for ink) because the pencil’s texture mimics how trauma fixes vivid, un-fading photographic images directly in a child’s mind. You see this immediately on the endpapers and the half-title page, where the child frames his world through the physical lens of his eyes to cope with the ruins around him.
Each scene is a discussion starter about war for an observant reader: of ruin and destruction, of juxtaposed images ( a bandaged teddy bear and bullet casings), of grief, dignity and wonder. O’Sullivan has contrasted an imagined steam punk world realised in glorious detail with the reactions and ruminations of a young man caught up in this harsh world.
Both author and artist raise questions in their different ways about the role of the observer and the observed, the viewer and the medium. War is omnipresent in our world and its effects are pervasive and long lasting. This book is a brave attempt to raise our consciousness about its horrors.
This is a thought-provoking picture book obviously aimed at older readers, a great discussion starter for upper primary up to and including Year 12.
