By James Calloway

More than 30 photographs taken by Australian veterans during their service in Afghanistan open at Sydney's Anzac Memorial on 29 September 2026, in an exhibition marking 25 years since Australian operations there began. Point & Shoot runs in the Memorial's Auditorium until 31 January 2027 and pairs every image with a written personal account from the veteran who made it.

The show forms part of the NSW Government's acknowledgement of the 25th anniversary of Australian service in Afghanistan. It recognises those who served in Afghanistan and across the Middle East Area of Operations.

What do the photographs actually show?

The images sit well outside the formal record of operations. They document places, people and moments the veterans themselves chose to frame — guard towers, helicopter extractions, mined orchards — rather than official deployments seen through a media lens.

Harry Moffitt's photograph of Khod Valley, taken in 2011, carries a caption that reads like a logbook: an 0400 start, eight straight hours of combat operations in enemy-dominated territory, then two hours crammed in an overloaded US Blackhawk before reacting to a high-value target on the way home. "Just another long day," he writes.

Alex Thomson's 2006 image shows the Afghan National Army guard tower at Jalalabad Airfield's perimeter. He was there to reconnoitre the adjacent orchard fields, which were mined. Security, he notes, was lax — and a few weeks later a suicide vehicle bomb hit the gate.

Jo Lovell's contribution from Uruzgan, 2011, records the escort of a casualty to a US aero-medical evacuation helicopter, bound for the Tarin Kot medical facility after an improvised explosive device strike in the Karmisan Valley. The picture compresses the war's human cost into a single frame.

Who built the project, and why?

Point Assist founder Mark Direen launched Point & Shoot in 2020. A former Infantry and Special Forces soldier, Direen served more than 25 years and completed six overseas deployments. He built the project, drawing on his own experience, as a creative outlet through which veterans could share their stories and perspectives in photography.

For practitioners, the model matters. The photographs were made not for publication or portfolio but as witness — cameras carried alongside duty, images annotated afterwards in plain language by the people who pressed the shutter. The craft here serves testimony: no editorial layer, no commissioning brief, no external gaze.

What changes for how this history is seen?

Rather than presenting a traditional military history, Point & Shoot foregrounds individual perspectives on service. The accompanying texts shift the images from documents of terrain into first-person narrative — the caption, not the caption writer, does the interpretive work.

Institutionally, the Anzac Memorial gives the work a civic frame it would not find in a commercial gallery. The images enter the same building that holds Australia's commemorative record, positioned as testimony rather than art-market product.

Practical details

Point & Shoot runs from 29 September 2026 to 31 January 2027 in the Anzac Memorial's Auditorium, Hyde Park, Sydney. Access depends on the Auditorium's availability, so visitors should contact the Memorial in advance on (02) 8262 2900.

With the anniversary programme now underway, the exhibition signals a growing institutional appetite for veteran-made imagery — and a route for more service photographers to place their archives before the public.