Kate Geraghty (born 1972) is an Australian war photographer, and photojournalist for The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Age[1] and five time Walkley winner.
[2] Geraghty started photographing professionally at Albury-Wodonga's The Border Mail in 1997, and photographing sport was formative; on one occasion she counted twenty-seven of her own pictures in one Monday-morning edition, a large number of them pictures of local sporting competitions that typically required her on any Saturday to cover "half a quarter of an AFL match, driving 100 kilometres to make the second half of a hockey match ... you'd cover at least seven games in the one day."
When the newspaper refused to send her to East Timor to record the 1999 crisis, she took her holiday there to take photographs that were then published.
[4] In 2001 she joined The Sydney Morning Herald,[5] where her first assignment was to cover the 2002 Bali bombings, describing it as "‘one of the most shocking things I’ve ever seen.
"[3] In 2003, Geraghty was the first Fairfax woman photographer to cover a war when Mike Bowers, her picture editor, assigned her to photograph the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and was astonished when senior management told him that he would be held accountable if anything happened to Geraghty, who is quoted as responding; "War has been a guy's game for decades and decades".
[5] Geraghty was with the Albury Border-Mail when in 1999-2000 Kosovo refugees were held at nearby Bandiana barracks then controversially sent back by the Australian federal government.
[3] When in 2013, she travelled to Uruzgan to interview the Afghanis and Matiullah Khan, the provincial chief of police the ADF attempted to 'derail' the assignment, as Geraghty explains; "The ADF/Australian government attempted to block us from reporting or staying in Uruzgan until Matiullah Khan stated we would be his guests...Although we had Afghan journo visas, the ADF at Tarin Kowt airbase would not let us proceed off the base from our commercial flight.
"[3]Since its introduction, Geraghty has embraced the multimedia platforms now used by her newspaper as a vehicle in which she has 'complete control of the story being told', being able, alongside a trusted journalist, to edit and provide audio and visuals unencumbered.
[3] Mike Bowers says of Kate Geraghty that "no one holds a candle to her," and rates her with Penny Bradfield and Tamara Dean.