Joan of Scone

Cover image courtesy of Bronwen Healy

For most industry folk across the Hunter Valley, Joan Faras is the mild-mannered English import behind the camera at farm photo-shoots. Her yearling shots and stallion profiles are exquisite, with all their dramatic light and shade, use of season and superb composition.

But away from the lens, Faras is actually an Irish-born, partly English-reared photographer that spent most of her life in farm management. She has held the reins of some of the most prominent studs across the last 40 years, yet she considers herself fairly uninteresting.

“I can’t imagine anything I’ve done would be particularly fascinating to anyone,” she said, but the truth is a little different.

While Faras has lived in downtown Scone for the last nine years, and she’s been in Australia since 1982, she’s lived all over the place from Dublin to Oxfordshire to Kentucky, Ocala and Sydney.

Roots manoeuvres

“I was born in Ireland, in a little place called Sandy Cove in County Dublin,” Faras said. “When I was eight, my family moved to England, and I was there in Oxfordshire until I left school. I quickly learned that I had to drop my Irish accent to fit in.”

Faras’ accent is softly English with a hint of somewhere else. In her case, it could be anywhere else, because after school she had ambition and did travel, albeit in an unexpected direction.

“My initial dream was to be a horse vet, but I didn’t get the marks to get into veterinary school at university,” she said. “So my next best passion was working on the farm, and I hoped that one day I’d be able to manage studs because all I wanted to do was be around horses, basically.”

Faras bypassed university, instead returning to Ireland where she worked for two years for Frank Feeney at Ardoon Stud. Feeney had raced the 1968 Irish 2000 Guineas winner Mistigo (Ire) (Miralgo {GB}), and he was a kind and astute Irish horseman.

After that, Faras enrolled in the Irish National Stud course of 1978, which became a defining qualification in her career.

“I loved it at the Irish National Stud,” she said. “I loved mixing with people the same age as me with the same passions that I had for the industry, and it really cemented my direction. Because of it I got the opportunity to go to Kentucky, and I ended up working there for three years.”

In Kentucky, Faras was immersed in that early eighties era of big names, big farms and big prices.

She spent time at Spendthrift under Leslie Combs when horses like Seattle Slew (USA), Affirmed (USA) and Nashua (USA) were there, along with Raise A Native (USA).

“Spendthrift was probably the leading stud in Kentucky in those days, it was way up there,” Faras said. “It was a very unique time to be there, I can tell you.”

Australia beckons

The greatest heads in the horse-racing industry usually have careers that start like this.

After three years in Kentucky, with all its size and dollars, Faras spent a few months starting yearlings in Ocala, Florida, before flying home to England. She hung around for six months doing this and that before an opportunity popped up with Brian Agnew’s Wakefield Stud in the Hunter Valley.

“A guy called Mike Phew, who I’d worked with in Kentucky, was managing Wakefield at that time, and I contacted him from England,” Faras said. “Those were the days when you wrote letters, and he wrote back and said he had something for me and that he’d love to have me there.”

In August 1982, Faras took the very long flight from London to Sydney.

“I packed my bags, got a year’s working-holiday visa and landed in Sydney,” she said. “Mike and his wife picked me up, drove me the what-was-then probably five hours to Scone, and I spent my first season in Australia at Wakefield.”

Brian Agnew’s Wakefield Stud was an emerging player in those days. Agnew was ambitious, intelligent and involved, a Sydney lawyer that took a hand in the creation of Aushorse and won an award later on for his services to the thoroughbred industry.

“Brian had only just bought the land at that stage when I showed up,” Faras said. “Wakefield was just starting up and Mike was developing it, and it was just a dairy farm at that point. Of course, it had lots of success later on, standing stallions and breeding Subzero.”

After that initial season at Wakefield, Faras went south to Sydney, to Neville Begg’s very busy training yard.

“He was an absolutely gorgeous man to work for,” she said. “I learned quite a bit from Neville, but living in the city wasn’t for me. There were too many people and too much traffic, and I couldn’t wait to get back out of it.”

From here to there

Faras’ time in Sydney reminded her that she wasn’t meant to live away from the country. She loved the slow-moving pleasantness of rural life and the simple familiarity of animals, so she went back to the Hunter to work at Widden Stud.

“I worked at Widden doing the foaling for a season, and while I was there I met a guy, as you do,” she said. “His name was Tim Faras and we ended up getting married, so I stayed in Australia and had two gorgeous kids.”

Faras moved around a bit in her marriage.

She and Tim were in Windsor for a time, then country Victoria and back to Widden. Her days in the Widden Valley, living on-property at Widden Stud, are filled with great memories of ‘Granny Thompson’ to this day.

“We spent seven years at Widden,” Faras said. “I did stints on the stud when I could, although it wasn't easy arranging child care in those days, and I worked for Granny Thompson in the garden. She was a great lady, and it was an amazing place to be.

“I had an ex-racehorse that I got going, and I did a bit of eventing with Derek Field's wife, Marguerite. We’d head off with the kids on the weekend and have a bit of fun.”

Faras’ marriage didn’t last after that, but her connection to the Hunter Valley did.

She spent a working tenure at Robert Crabtree’s Dorrington Farm in Victoria, and then another at Stan Johnson’s Twin Palms Stud in Lochinvar before returning to her adopted roots around Scone. For the best part of a decade, she was at Willow Park Stud and then, in more recent history, at Neale Bruce’s Berkeley Park.

Life behind the lens

By the time Faras had landed at Berkeley Park Stud, she had a lifetime of stud work behind her. It was physical work, much of it done while raising two children, and her photography skills intervened for a new path.

“I’d always had a half-decent camera all my life,” she said. “Taking photos of horses probably started about eight years ago at Neale’s place, and I was helping outside in the mornings and then around the office in the afternoons. A lot of it was client communications, and the best way I thought to do that was take photos.

“So I started taking photos of the foals, which then led to the yearlings, and I thought I needed to get better at it. I did a few different photography courses and workshops, and people started seeing what I was doing at Berkeley Park and asking me if I could do yearling photos for them.”

Faras didn’t have to network too hard to get her work out there. She’d spent over 30 years in the Australian breeding industry, and the work came so thick and fast that she eventually gave away her day job.

“It was a really weird evolvement,” she said. “It wasn’t something I planned. I just fell into it, really.”

Faras won’t be pinned down on her own talents, which at this point are award-winning. Instead, she says that she knows what she likes.

“I know what I like to see in a horse, and I want my photographs to be a true representation of that horse,” she said. “I wanted the photo to represent what the horse looks like, because you can take a terrible photo and it’s nothing like what the horse looks like.”

This genuine eye for beauty and appreciation for the equine shape is something that has set Faras up as one of the most brilliant industry photographers in New South Wales, and also one of the most liked.

There is no arrogance about her, and no ego, and she’s quick to remember everyone who helped her along the way.

“I’ve gone out on my own now and it’s my business, and I did that about four years ago,” she said. “I was helped very significantly by Georgie Mitchell who, at the time, was scaling back her own photography, and she gave me quite a good rap with a number of her clients. I’ll be forever grateful for that.”

The perfect shot, the perfect job

These days, Faras photographs the yearlings, foals and stallions for the likes of Widden Stud, Arrowfield, Sledmere, Kitchwin Hills, Ashleigh Thoroughbreds, Vinery, Segenhoe and so many others.

She does so each time with great patience and exactness, because it’s not always easy taking pictures of horses. They fidget and move around, while other factors like poor weather can contribute to the challenge of getting the perfect shot.

“Background is so important,” Faras said. “People don’t realise that a background is half the photo, and if you’ve got a messy background, or you’re too close to your background, your subject just doesn’t stand out enough for my liking. Open space behind them is what I’m always looking for.”

After so long in the industry, Faras has seen significant changes in how things are done on horse farms.

“There’s so much money around now, and the professionalism on farms is so good today,” she said. “Back in my day, there were no photos or anything. There was just a catalogue, and nothing online, of course.

“There is so much online access now to videos and photographs through websites and social media, and even more since COVID. That side of things has really grown, and it’s here to stay.”

In the coming winter, Faras is loading up her newly ordered campervan and hitting the remote, dusty roads of Far North Queensland. Her son is there on a cattle run, and the remoteness appeals to her.

She will bring her trusty Sony equipment and her enthusiasm, which is she is never short of.

“I can’t wait to go mustering up there and take photos,” she said. “And that’s the thing about this job. Photography is a brilliant way for me to still be in touch with horses and all their people, but without the hard work that comes with it.

“I’m getting older now and, as much as I loved it all the way through my life, I couldn’t do farm-work forever.”