Mike Bowers
Talking Pictures host and Photographer
Mike Bowers is an award-winning photographer, author, regular commentator on ABC Radio, as well as the host of ABC’s Talking Pictures on Insiders.
Mike has spent 39 years in the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery working for a number of publications, including The Australian, The Canberra Times, The Age, The Bulletin, The Australian Financial Review, BRW, Time, The Daily Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald. He covered 13 Federal election campaigns and has accompanied 10 prime ministers on assignments both around Australia and overseas.
He has covered conflicts in Cambodia, Kosovo, Bougainville, PNG and the Middle East.
Mike was Pictorial Editor for the Sydney Morning Herald from 2001 to 2008. He was Chief Photographer for the Sydney Morning Herald before striking out on his own in late 2008.
He took up a role with philanthropically funded online news venture The Global Mail in 2011 as photographic editor and photographer before moving to The Guardian Australia as photographer at large when they established a presence in Australia in 2013. He lectured in photojournalism at UTS during 2010-2011. Mike left The Guardian in November 2024 to pursue his own projects.
Mike has published five books: Fit to Print, Gallipoli Untold Stories, The Big Picture: 175 Years of The Sydney Morning Herald and A Century of Pictures: 100 Years of Herald Photography. His fourth book, Armageddon: Two Men on an ANZAC Trail, was a joint venture with journalist Paul Daley.
In 2024, Mike curated a major Exhibition at the National Library in Canberra, Fit to Print, which was selected from the 18,000 glass plate negatives from the Fairfax collection. It spanned the early history of photojournalism from the late 1890s to around 1940.
Mike has been a finalist in the NPPP (National Photographic Portrait Prize) three times, has won two Nikon Photographer of the Year awards in 1996 for his Photographic Essay on the PNG Sandline Crisis and his Portrait of Labor defector Senator Mal Colston, as well as the 2012 Kennedy Award for Outstanding Photographic Essay, and has been a finalist in the Walkley Awards for photojournalism.
He lives in Sydney with his wife Paula, with whom he has two children. They also have a troublesome and much-loved Labrador named Otis and a crazed cat called Mosh Pit.
Some of Mike’s award-winning photos:
Talking Pictures on Insiders on ABC
Hosted by Mike, each week he takes a look at the latest political images, photos and cartoons with a guest as they dissect and discuss them. He wrote the idea for Talking Pictures on a coaster, while on a pub crawl in Belgium with Barrie Cassidy two decades ago.
“Really, the strength and the enduring nature of Talking Pictures is due to the quality of the cartoons and still photos. We are blessed in this country to have some of the finest political cartoonists in the world – we really do.”
Mike Bowers Talking Pictures Host
