In news photography, getting “the shot” is part planning, part luck.
On Monday, May 12 – two weeks into Erin Patterson’s trial in the usually quiet Victorian country town of Morwell – most of the photographers and journalists covering the case were taking the opportunity of a jury-free day to get some well-earned rest.
Martin Keep, though, ventured out into the bitter cold, a custom rig held high above his head with studio flashes twisted around his camera. It was something that photographer Keep, his colleagues, and The Age photographer Jason South had never seen before – a bizarre creation, born out of a chance find at former Jetstar pilot Greg Lynn’s trial almost a year before.
For years in Melbourne, photographers hadn’t bothered chasing police vans, thinking they couldn’t capture the scene inside. “But the Greg Lynn case changed all that,” South said.
“[Age colleague] Joe Armao got a picture inside [Lynn’s] van without anybody in it, and he showed me. He said: ‘You can see in there.’ I spent days and days, and got Greg Lynn in that van.
“Martin was on the [Patterson] job with me, and he was asking how, and what, and where. On the first day, he did actually get a really dark, soft and grainy photo of [Patterson] in the van.
“He went home and thought on how he could make it better, and he built this whole rig to go around the camera … then he had the most amazing luck.”
Patterson also wasn’t expecting any media to bother showing up at Morwell Police Station on May 12; she thought they’d spare themselves the boring legal argument, South suggested.
The custom rig photographer Martin Keep used to capture Erin Patterson.
Photographers had two chances a week to capture her in the van – when she was en route to and from the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre in Melbourne’s west.
On May 12, Keep – photographing for Agence France-Presse – thought he’d test out his rig for the first time, and caught Patterson staring dead-eyed through the window of the police van.
In his images, her shock at being photographed is visceral. Her face falls before she turns away from the camera, covering her face with her hands, in a now-iconic set of photographs.
From then on, though, Patterson seemed wary of being photographed again while in the police van.
“After that series of flashes through the window, [photographers] never saw her [by the window] again,” South said.
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“She would hold a book to the window, or dive underneath the window, or … [sit with] the back of her head on the window, so there’s no chance of seeing her. She’d ride like that all the way to Melbourne – 165 kilometres back.”
Light and shade, and a quiet moment with a book
After Patterson began ducking underneath the van’s windows, South and other photographers started following her down the highway.
For weeks, they tried to capture her in the nearby West Gippsland town of Trafalgar, but their efforts were fruitless. They came away with blurry shots of a book, or the back of Patterson’s head, after routinely triggering traffic lights there.
One day, when the van arrived back at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, South had a thought harking back six years to George Pell’s sex abuse trial, when he captured the cardinal on a prison van’s CCTV screen.
Corrections officers use the screens to keep an eye on passengers.
“When the van [pulled] up … I just parked in the car park and walked up to the passenger’s side, and photographed the screen – I just drilled it for about 30 frames,” South said.
South caught Patterson completely unawares, reading a book with her legs outstretched. The shot which was among the Age photographer’s personal highlights from the months-long trial, during which he took advantage of light and shadow at the Latrobe Valley Law Courts to curate interesting frames.
“[A] picture of Simon [Patterson] walking out into that light, we were practicing and preparing the exposures and everything … and then for him to gaze up at the heavens just made it a really nice and poignant moment,” South said.
A few weeks into the trial, South introduced studio lights into his photographs. One shot, of barrister Colin Mandy, SC, under flash, took him four days to achieve.
“They kept walking out and turning a different direction [to] wherever I would set the lights up – you had to take a punt they would go that way,” South said.
“On day four, it happened, and even the people inside the court were cheering that I finally got the result.”
A 10-week ‘lesson in patience’
For South, covering Patterson’s triple-murder case was one of the most difficult jobs of his decades-long career, for one reason alone.
“There’s so little variety to shoot,” South said.
“You’re shooting the same people, at the same place, for 10 weeks straight. Trying to make interesting pictures in the ninth and tenth week was a real lesson in patience.
“Then you add having to get there in the early morning to get people queuing up, and trying to grab a frame of the prosecutor, who would always try and sneak in before the media.
“You’d have early mornings in the sometimes sub-zero temperatures, and then be there at 4.30pm in the afternoon, when they come out.”
South and other media initially thought the trial would go for about a month. He ended up having to tell his family, repeatedly, “just one more week”. His children, aged 18 and 22, caught on to the delay and it became a running joke.
“When I came home, they quipped: ‘Are you my daddy?’” South said with a laugh.
There’s one other of South’s photos that stands out for him – a lone death cap mushroom, which he and Daily Mail photographer Steve Cook found under oak trees at Loch Memorial Reserve, after the area came up in evidence during the trial.
“There was one lonely death cap all by itself, still there,” South said. “We felt pretty lucky about that.”
A stakeout and Erin Patterson’s only interview
It was in early August 2023 when the news first broke that three people had died after a family lunch in Leongatha, about 60 kilometres south-west of Morwell.
The Age crime reporter Marta Pascual Juanola, based in Melbourne, grabbed her camera gear and raced down to South Gippsland to begin what then became an eight-day reporting trip to cover the biggest crime story of the year.
On August 7, she’d spent most of the morning trying to figure out who the victims were, and who had cooked the fateful meal, before she landed the tip that gave her their names.
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She managed to track down Patterson’s address, where she knew the lunch had been held, and parked outside her house for hours, waiting for the mother of two to emerge and engage with the waiting media pack.
When Patterson finally came outside, Pascual Juanola was there, waiting with her DSLR camera to capture the moment. Holding her phone with one hand to record her comments and using the other to shoot her portrait, the reporter captured an emotional Patterson as she told journalists she loved the people who had attended the lunch.
Looking up into the sky as if searching for answers, Patterson dabbed at her eyes with a tissue – but did not appear to have any tears.
The result was a Quill Award-nominated series of compelling portraits, which captured Patterson’s emotional appeal for sympathy in what would become her only interview with the media.
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