IN FOCUS: award for series on cancer patient

Cancer patient John Elliott (79) is comforted by his wife in a Zurich hotel. The photograph is part of a series by Kate Geraghty, who has won Australia's top photography prize.
Photograph: Kate Geraghty

Kate Geraghty has won Australia's major photographic award for the second year in a row.

Geraghty (35), who has been working for The Irish Times during a six-month exchange from the Sydney Morning Herald , yesterday received the Nikon Walkley Award for Press Photographer of the Year. The Walkley Awards are Australia's most prestigious journalism and photographic prizes.

Geraghty won for her photographic essay on John Elliott (79), a Sydney cancer patient who travelled to Zurich with his wife Angelika last January to die by euthanasia.

The judges said Geraghty's photographs "are a painfully intimate insight into a man's dying wish and a wife's crippling grief".

"She captures it with compassion and consummate skill, moving the viewer with the simplest of details without ever seeming to intrude on the Elliotts' quiet dignity."

After photographing the couple in Sydney, Geraghty travelled with them to Switzerland to photograph John Elliott's last days.

"He was crying with pain when I first met him," she said yesterday. "He had to walk on to the plane by himself, because it had to be an 'unassisted' suicide."

Geraghty won the 2006 award for photographs of the Lebanon war. She returns to the Sydney Morning Herald in January.

View Kate Geraghty's award-winning slideshow: Last Goodbye, on the Sydney Morning Herald:

http://www.smh.com.au/multimedia/national/dr-john-elliott/start.html

© 2007 The Irish Times

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times