Michael Coyne isn’t a flash photographer, in any sense of the term.
Getting to the truth of the matter always takes precedence over the impulse to startle or shock, the stock-in-trade of quotidian newspaper photographers. Shock sells.
The most distinguishing characteristic of Coyne’s photography is a palpable respect for his subjects—even the dead ones.
A case in point is his 1995 image of skeletal corpses in a church in Rwanda, following the massacres. The scene is sufficiently awful not to require the kind of compositional gimcrackery that a less sensitive eye might have enlisted. We feel the eerie silence and ineffable sorrow of the scene in muted monochrome. Coyne refuses to use these poor souls as horror show props.
There are no cheap shots in his canon. They have all been achieved through a combination of technical skill, a clear empathy with humanity and a willingness to get to the heart of the matter, rather than skim over the surface.
(Coyne himself has said it’s as much about having the required combination of qualities—equal parts nous, charm and determination—to get to the place where the photo actually is, unaided by photo agency helicopters, or Faustian deals. He is one of the last of the genuinely independent photojournalists.)
Coyne’s work is featured in the most recent of the Contemporary Photographers: Australia series of monographs, joining the distinguished company of Lewis Morley, Wolfgang Sievers, David Moore and Graham McCarter.
This series is not for coffee-table ornamentation, but rather for lovers and students of great photography, and in Coyne’s case, humanist fellow travellers. It’s modestly priced, soft-covered, and slightly under A4 format. Non-glossy paper stock and pleasing reproduction, especially of the black-and-white work, complete the photo-friendly presentation.
Coyne is no less distinguished than the other photographers in the series, but rather less well known in Australia than he is in the world of international photojournalism. In his early twenties he went directly from the arcane challenges of photographing ice-cream in suburban Melbourne in summer to being embedded with the Moro Liberation Army in the Philippines.
He is one of an élite group of photojournalists invited to join the renowned New York-based Black Star photo agency.
Early in his career he was commissioned by National Geographic to cover the Iran–Iraq War, the outcome being an unprecedented 28-page picture spread—and ‘please explains’ to the publisher from the United States government.
His simple image of a row of callipers parked under a portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini