‘A photographic hero’: Former Age photographer Cathryn Tremain dies aged 66

Friends and ex-colleagues have paid tribute to former Age photographer and Walkley Award winner Cathryn Tremain, who has died aged 66.

Tremain started her career as a photographer at The Border Mail in Albury-Wodonga in the early 1980s, before joining The Age, where she worked until the early 2000s.

Passengers waiting in a pebble-dash bus shelter near Camberwell Market, 1993.

She won the 1994 Walkley Award for best feature photograph for her image titled Little Rays of Sunshine, of a premature baby in the neo-natal intensive care unit at the Royal Women’s Hospital.

Tremain “passed away peacefully with her family by her side at home” on July 22, according to a tribute from her relatives.

Fellow former Age photographer Chris Beck said he was inspired and entranced by Tremain’s images while he was working at Leader Newspapers in the 1980s.

“There was a lot of very good, strong photographers around that time ... But Cathy was a particular one that I followed because she had a real beauty to her photographs,” he said.

Beck said he mentioned to a friend who was working at The Age at the time how much he admired Tremain’s work, only for her to send him a copy of the particular image he’d found so inspiring, signed by the photographer herself.

“She didn’t know who I was, but she printed out a photograph and sent it to me and signed it.”

Beck said he ended up working at The Age soon after and got to know Tremain well.

He said Tremain rarely spoke about her artistic process and how she approached taking photographs, but just had an innate creativity that shone through in her work.

Aerospace engineer Bradley Macpherson in an image that was part of a series that was highly commended at the 1999 Walkley Awards.

“She was just instinctively artistic,” he said. “I don’t think she thought about how she was going to make something, she just knew instinctively how to take beautiful photographs.

“She never really talked about it ... She never really discussed how she did it, why she did it, how great she was. She just did it.”

Photographer Cathryn Tremain at The Age in 2002.

Tremain was an earthy, approachable yet tough character, whom he looked up to. “I saw her as a bit of a photographic hero ... She was someone who was instinctive and did such beautiful work,” Beck said.

Age senior writer Wendy Tuohy worked extensively with Tremain and fondly recalled her former colleague’s talents.

“When you scored her on your job you knew you were likely to get a free ride to the front end of the paper, care of her gifted perspective and intuitive talent for composition,” Tuohy said.

“She did have a seemingly ‘tough’ exterior, and didn’t waste words, but her pictorial art revealed her to be finely tuned to the small things that connect us. She seemed impervious to sentiment, but her images were tender.

“Looking at her pictures, you wondered how she’d found these striking details in a scene where you may not have noticed anything out of the ordinary.

“She made nothing of her skill and creativity, and her subjects seemed to understand she met them at eye level. She captured magic we’d otherwise have missed.”

Jim Pavlidis, a long-time artist with The Age, said Tremain’s seemingly tough exterior belied a very sensitive person who had a great eye for capturing fleeting moments.

“She appeared tough to outsiders – no bullshit – but she was an incredibly sensitive person. She took really beautiful, considered pictures,” Pavlidis said.

“Creatively she was incredible; she had a beautiful, really sensitive touch.”

Fiona Lawrence, who also worked as an artist at The Age in the 1980s and ’90s, said Tremain’s photography was much admired by her colleagues.

“What I remember about Cathy the most is, just apart from her very genuine and outgoing personality, was that ... everyone spoke about her work with such reverence,” Lawrence said.

The water wall at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria.

“People would just sit with the weekend papers, and it would always be unanimous that her work contained something special ...

“She had an ability to engage with everyone on a very personal level.”

Tremain is survived by her mother Val, brothers Peter and Paul, and nieces and nephews.

She was farewelled by family and friends on Thursday in a service at the Glenmorus Memorial Gardens Chapel near Albury.

Paul Tremain addressed the crowd of about 70 people gathered for the service, The Border Mail reported.

“Cathryn learned from an early age to be strong, resilient and fiercely independent,” he said.

“She was taken with photography at a very young age.”

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