Land Before Lines was a project made possible by an earlier life lived in the company of writers and poets. As a creative writing student inspired by poetry, NWH enmeshed himself in the local literary scene, attending book launches, readings and even typesetting a poetry journal.

Intrigued by the respect and fascination he harboured for these individuals, he introduced the idea of photography. The photographic encounters he initiated with poets – some of whom he knew, others being known only through his engagement with their words – NWH established or deepened his connections. Committed to working with poets of all persuasions – academic, street, performance, established and emerging – he travelled across his home state of Victoria, approaching each on the terms of their language.

Being interpretive images shaped by the words, conversations, and half-heard lines preceding the shutter, these portraits are less about rendering a likeness than a reading. But they are also only one half of each story - the other assuming the form of a poem written by the photographed poet in response to their image. The resulting call-and-response collaborations became the publication Land Before Lines (Hunter Publishers, 2014), which John Kinsella described as “a literary and photographic topography of the contemporary Victorian poetry scene.”

This publication launched during the first exhibition of the portraits, which held as part of the 2014 Emerging Writers’ Festival. The portraits exhibited again at Manning Clark House later that year, before being acquired by the State Library of Victoria. A selection of the photographs appeared many years later exhibiting alongside other visual artworks of Victorian-state writers as part of Mirror: new views on photography.