A photo from Heide Smith’s Hamelin collection in the ’50s and ’60s.

A photo from Heide Smith’s Hamelin collection in the ’50s and ’60s.

A photo from Heide Smith’s Hamelin collection in the ’50s and ’60s.

A photo from Heide Smith’s Hamelin collection in the ’50s and ’60s.

A photo from Heide Smith’s Hamelin collection in the ’50s and ’60s.

A photo from Heide Smith’s Hamelin collection in the ’50s and ’60s.

Photos from Heide Smith’s collection of Hamelin in the ’50s and ’60s. 

THE medieval town of Hameln (Hamelin) in Germany is world-famous because of its legendary pied piper, but it also numbers among its native daughters one of Australia’s (and Canberra’s) leading photographers – Heide Smith.

The Mayor of Hameln, Claudio Griese, will open an exhibition, “A Master of Light and Shadows: Heide Smith”, on August 25 in the office of the local Hameln paper, “Dewezet”, where Heide worked in the ’50s and ’60s. 

Alas, with severe spinal problems plaguing her, she won’t be making the long journey back. 

“About a year and a half ago they contacted me and asked if I would like to do an exhibition on Hameln,” she says by phone from her home in Tuross. 

“I had already donated 55 images of my old hometown to the Museum of Hameln and when the exhibition closes, the prints will be handed over to them, too.”

She doubts they will be showing much of her non-German work, rather concentrating on her early images of Hameln during the ’50s and ’60s, including images she snapped for the local paper.

Born Heide Soltsien in 1937, Smith took up a camera in 1948, passed through an exacting German photographic training, then began her career as an industrial photographer then photojournalist.

After marrying British army officer Brian Smith, she moved to England in 1963, then in 1971 the couple emigrated to Australia, eventually ending up in Canberra, where she and Brian ran a flourishing business while Heide snapped the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful, also shooting landscapes and urban scenes.

“I am a GP – general photographer,” she always says.

In early 1998 they moved to Narooma and later Tuross, where she continued to take portrait photographs, travel Australia on corporate assignments, and publish seminal books such as “Tiwi: The Life and Art of Australia’s Tiwi People” and “Portrait of Canberra and of Canberrans, 1979 – 2012”. 

From time to time, she sends “CityNews” glorious snaps of the panoramic views and the birdlife of the area. 

In Germany, Heide reminds me, “photography was called a trade – not art”, but she did enjoy supplying images of young people to magazines while also photographing townsfolk who may now look “quaint and old-fashioned”.

“Hameln is very famous because of the fairytale, but most German towns in those days, around 800 AD, were infected with rats and had to employ someone to get rid of them, so when the townspeople reneged on promises to give him a small fortune after the rats died, things went astray. 

Another factor in the legend, she tells me, was the departure of many young people to the Balkans in search of fortune, perhaps explaining the tale of the disappeared children.

Famous for its Renaissance buildings and much older ones too, Hamelin’s existence was threatened by a plan to sanitise the whole part of the city, but the townspeople fought for it and so now it’s very much a tourist town, something into which Heide’s exhibition will fit well.

Heide has not lived in Germany for many years, but she did return in 1994 after the German embassy in Canberra asked her to photograph the country after the unification of the east and west. 

“Brian and I travelled together to Dresden and to many places I have never seen, resulting in the exhibition, “Germany Revisited” in 1995, launched by [then] Foreign Minister Gareth Evans at the High Court and later launched in Sydney at the Goethe Institute by Neville Wran.”

This photography trip was a grand mission, but Heide had begun as a modest apprentice by photographing personalities and landmarks around her hometown and it is those early photographs which piqued the interest of Hameln’s town historian, Dr Gesa Snell.

“The exhibition was not my idea, I was approached by them,” Heide says, but though notoriously unsentimental, she’s plainly pleased.

“It’s flattering for someone to come up with the idea of exhibiting your very old images and when you get to my age, you know you can’t live forever and it’s obviously quite nice that someone remembered. Yes, it’s nice.”