This project was made possible by an earlier life lived in the company of writers and poets. As a student of creative writing, Walton-Healey read – and sometimes even wrote – poetry. Inspired by the artistry associated with the form, he became enmeshed within the local literary scene, attending many book launches and poetry readings.

He increasingly explored the respect and fascination he harboured for the individuals within this community with his camera. By initiating photographic encounters with poets – some of whom he knew, others being known only through his engagement with their words – the photographer deepened existing connections and made many new ones. Committed to engaging poets of every stripe – academic, street, performance, established and emerging – he travelled across his home state of Victoria, approaching each poet and encounter on the terms of their language.

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

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