Legendary Photographer that literally took the money shot of our K50.
Hello my name is Lawrence Roe but everyone knows me all too well as Rocky Roe. I was born in Adelaide in 1947.
I first came to PNG in 1976 as a mechanical fitter working for Bougainville Copper, then in 1979 I moved to Port Moresby working as a photographer. The pay wasn’t half as good but being in the city was much more exciting as it beat living in a single men’s quarters.
Since moving to Port Moresby in 1979 I have lived most of my years here except for lots of travels around this beautiful country. My journey through photography for the past 44 years has been great and I would say that the best of what I have accumulated in these experiences is just being able to see Papua New Guinea in its growth and more in all my travels.
Being a photographer is wonderful as the job takes you to new places and meeting new people and experiencing different scenes; I wanted to see more of Papua New Guinea and leaving Bougainville in ’76 was due to an opportunity to get paid to see more of this country.
PNG was quite a different scene back in the 70s as the population was not as big as it is today and the infrastructure saw better days than it does now.
Photography for me started with advertising in corporate works that had mostly to do with annual reports and I found that really interesting. I was shooting film back in the day and this was way before digital was invented and I did this with a box type camera and this could only get ten shots to a roll of film. Now with digital cameras I can get ten shots done per second.
Over the years I have had so many great memories of what I capture through my lens and most of it all is just PNG in general. But I suppose one that I feel is the best subject I’ve ever photographed was Sir Michael Somare. I found him to have a very interesting face and he was always nice to talk with as he was very friendly and quite chatty. Of the other Prime Ministers, Sir Michael Somare was the best from a photographer’s point of view.
The portrait of Sir Michael on the K50 note was a picture chosen by him that I had shot several months earlier, I didn’t know about it at the time, I only discovered it after it came out that it was one of the pictures I had taken so that was an honor. The Grand Chief told me before it was chosen, “Rocky it’s not one of your better portraits.” I apologized and off he left for a meeting, only to find out later he had selected that picture for the Bank of PNG. Bertha Somare said, “…he’s winding you up. He loves it.” Sir Michael Somare and I used to make jokes like, “Wouldn’t it be nice to get a percentage of turnover every time someone used it to pick up a toy or something like that?” That would’ve been really nice but we used to just joke about that. The first time I photographed him was in the studio in Boroko, and that was the first of many times over the years.
I have captured many moments in my 44 years in Papua New Guinea and I am honored to have been there to take them. I love PNG and I am grateful for all the places I have seen, the people I have met and the jobs that I have done.
Photo credit to Rocky Roe
