As a boy growing up in Brewarrina, Mervyn Bishop would watch his mum take photos of her children on her Kodak 620 camera.
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It was this that sparked an interest in photography which would later become a lifelong passion and lead to a successful career spanning 60 years.
By the age of 10, borrowing his mother's camera, Bishop would go and take photos of aeroplanes flying over town.
Eventually, he saved up enough money mowing lawns to buy a 35mm camera which he used to document his family and life in Brewarrina in the 1950s.
As his passion for photography grew, the family began hosting slide nights in their backyard, with "half the street" coming along to see Bishop's photos projected onto an old sheet strung on the clothesline.
A local amateur photographer, Vic King, showed Bishop how to develop photographs in his makeshift darkroom, and it was here that the teen became hooked on the "magic" of printing.
"I started fiddling around in the dark room of Vic King," he told an enthralled crowd at Bank Art Museum Moree during his artist talk on Friday.
"I loved it."
These early years set the foundation for Bishop to become Australia's first Aboriginal press photographer, securing a cadetship with The Sydney Morning Herald in 1963, after finishing boarding school in Dubbo and moving to Sydney.
Bishop spent 18 years at the Herald, during which time he won the News Photographer of the Year Award in 1971 with his front-page photograph Life and Death Dash (1971).
He went on to work at the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Canberra in 1974 where he covered the major developments in Aboriginal communities throughout Australia.
This included his iconic image from 1975 when the (then) Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, poured a handful of earth back into the hand of Vincent Lingiari, Gurindji elder and traditional landowner.
This image and more of his iconic photographs of defining moments in Australia's political and social history, personal images of family and friends, and intimate portraits of members of the Aboriginal community feature in the Mervyn Bishop exhibition, which was officially opened at BAMM on Friday evening.
About 60 people attended the opening, including Bishop himself and Art Gallery of NSW programs producer Wesley Shaw, who both spoke.
"Mervyn is really engaging," BAMM director Vivien Clyne said.
"He has lots of great stories to tell - he's done so much travelling throughout Australia and has met so many different people.
"He spoke about some of the relationships he ended up having with the people he was photographing all the time, like Gough Whitlam and other people in politics.
"He also shared the stories behind those iconic photos and some of the things he had to do to get the right shot.
"People really enjoyed it."
During the artist talk on Friday morning, Bishop shared his story and showed the crowd of about 35 some of the photos he'd taken at Moree over the years.
He'd been to Moree multiple times throughout his career - the first time was when he was working for The Sydney Morning Herald and came to cover the opening of the Overseas Telecommunications Commission (OTC) Satellite Earth Station.
There were a number of familiar faces among the photographs Bishop shared from a visit in 1988, including of Lloyd Munro and Mary Swan's father.
The Mervyn Bishop exhibition is on show at BAMM until June 22.
