Quotes of the Day

Twenty years ago, when Heide Smith began photographing the Tiwi islanders, some of the older folk would say, "Better not photograph me, I might die soon," she recalls. For the Tiwi, as for most other Australian Aborigines, uttering a newly dead person's name or looking at their image is forbidden.

When German-born Smith first visited the Tiwi's home islands of Bathurst and Melville, north of Darwin, most people were wary of outsiders and suspicious of the camera. But the photos she took on that brief stay in 1987 changed the Tiwi elders' minds. They agreed to let her make a book about the people who'd "captured my heart," and gave her the run of the islands.

Smith soon became part of the family — there are only 2700 Tiwi, a name that means "we the only people." And they learned to live in front of her camera as if it wasn't there. For Tiwi (1990), she captured every aspect of daily life and ceremony, but it's the portraits that stay with you. Even when her subjects are naked, they are clothed in dignity. Even when they pose (one old man insisted on wearing a cockatoo-feather headdress), they are simply themselves.

Many Tiwi still keep pictures she took in the small boxes or bags where they stow their precious things. When she returned four years ago, "They all wanted to show me their photo in the book." Many posed again for Portrait of a People, her new, self-published book (heidesmith.com). Some had died, and too many of those were young. Alcohol, cannabis and gambling "are breaking things up," Smith writes. The suicide rate on the Tiwi islands is 10 times the Australian average.

In 2006, a young man Smith had often photographed killed himself. At his funeral, she was shocked to see one of her photos. "Linked by their arms, the immediate family step up to the image, touching it, sobbing and crying," Smith wrote in her diary. Now, "when someone dies they contact me and ask me for a photo so they can have it at the funeral." The traditional ban has been turned upside down; but that's true of most of Tiwi life.

Smith dedicates Portrait "to the memory of the Tiwi who have tragically taken their own lives in recent times" — at least 40 since 1998. "Maybe when Tiwi look at this book," she says, "they will connect with the past again a little bit" and recapture some of their old spirit. Pictures of the dead, once banned, may now help Tiwi and their culture embrace life.

• Elizabeth Keenan