Inside the lens of Andrew Quilty: Award-winning photojournalist to speak in Sydney

Australian photojournalist Andrew Quilty will share the story behind his remarkable career at a special presentation hosted by Kayell Australia in Sydney on August 26.

The evening event, held at Kayell Australia's Artarmon showroom, will see Quilty reflect on a journey that has taken him from a rejected university photography application to becoming one of Australia's most acclaimed documentary photographers.

Quilty's path into photography began in 2000 after his application for a university photography elective was turned down. Instead, he set off around Australia with a surfboard and a Nikon F3 handed down by his photographer uncle.

Just a week into the trip, his van was broken into, leaving only the camera—which had been carefully hidden—and his surfboard, which he was using at the time.

After travelling more than 30,000 kilometres, Quilty enrolled at the Sydney Institute of TAFE, graduating at the top of his photography class in 2004. An informal internship at Fairfax Media soon developed into a full-time role, where he worked alongside many of Australia's leading newspaper photographers before moving into freelance photography in 2010.

A relocation to New York followed in 2012, but it was a reporting trip to Afghanistan and the Middle East in 2013 that proved to be a defining moment in his career.

Since then, Quilty has become internationally recognised for his long-term documentation of Afghanistan, travelling to two-thirds of the country's 34 provinces while producing work that has been published by major media outlets around the world.

His photography has earned numerous honours, including a World Press Photo award, a Pictures of the Year International Award of Excellence, a George Polk Award, a Sony World Photography Awards honour and six Walkley Awards, including the prestigious Gold Walkley. In 2016, a selection of his Afghanistan work was exhibited at the Visa pour l'Image in Perpignan, France.

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