I (as in Fred Harden) was the ‘official’ Catalyst photographer for about a year, late 1966 to late 1967 while I was a Photography student at RMIT.  I went off to work full time before my final year, and Ross Dufty took over. His photographs were much better.

It seems like my task was was mostly taking pictures of student activities, the ‘riot in the SRC office’ cover, a few visits by politicians and lots of pictures of Miss RMIT candidates. There were some very bad pictures (‘ordinary’ is being generous) but there were some editorial assignments where for some reason, the images were good enough to go into my final folio (which mercifully is long lost). There’s some of them here in the pages of the Catalyst PDF.
I always wanted to be a film maker, but someone advised my parents that “the Australian Film Industry wasn’t going to happen and Fred can always make a living photographing weddings”,  so it was a struggle to get the School to agree to let my final major project to be a 16mm documentary film. You’ll find more of that history on Whileiremember.it my archive site.

These images are taken from the videos I made on the July 22 visit, and I’ve made them black and white to hide some lowlight ‘video’ artefacts. Then I added some grain (Oh, Photoshop you’ve changed everything) because after looking at the old Catalyst pages, I was more than a bit nostalgic for when I always used 35mm Kodak TRI-X film and sometimes ‘push processed’ it to get even more speed, and grain.