I knew the photographer Gary Heery through his partner Saskia Havekes of Grandiflora — the most famous florist in town — and I knew his work, which I have long admired.

As has this column’s photographer John Appleyard for whom Heery is a kind of hero.

So although we had never worked together, we were on a solid conversational footing, rapping about our favourite publications, life in the world of advertising in New York and Sydney in the 1970s, personalities we’d encountered, nice, naff and downright nasty.

On Heery’s list of the nice? Joe Cocker and Frank Zappa. Not so nice? Ricki Lee Jones.

So when and where did the photography bug first bite this lanky Double Bay lad?

“Right after I finished my arts degree at the University of NSW. I was 22. I had an American friend here, Jim Steiner, who had an interest in photography. He was very good at copying other people’s work. Irving Penn was his go. He taught me about that school. Then I went to New Guinea with him,” he said.

I interrupt to recall Penn’s famous suite of images of New Guinea tribesmen and mud men, which I knew from their first volcanic appearance in American Vogue.

I had seen the original prints in a celebrated retrospective of his work at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

These images were probably what inspired the visit and set Heery on his career path.

Next stop, in 1978, the US. Not New York just yet. First a job in Oklahoma with a magazine called American Indian. After which blooding, the Big Apple beckoned.

“I was living on Broadway between Prince and Houston,” he said.

“I’d go uptown with my portfolio to these swanky offices.

“One day I headed to an office, maybe Conde Nast. The cool dude interviewing me kept staring and eventually asks: ‘Do you always turn up for interviews looking like this?’

“On the subway I’d been reading the New York Times and the ink had come off on my hands.

“I’d wiped my brow a couple of times and ended up looking like someone fresh off a commando training course.”

Photographs for prestige publications — such as Esquire, Interview, New Yorker and “a couple of things for LIFE magazine which was then in its death throes” — were among his New York trophies.

“And I got to shoot features on some of the happening places of that period, including Studio 54,” he said.

Heery also established an impressive roster of personalities in front of his lens — Madonna, Andy Warhol, Elvis Costello, Cate Blanchett, Ewan McGregor, Russell Crowe, Brett Whiteley, Sam Neill. You get the picture.

A good deal of Heery’s American work involved images for album covers.

“The last shot I did before returning was for the cover of Paul Simon’s album Graceland,” he said.

“He was the first person to buy the negatives of the shoot off me. For $10,000. That was the beginning of the move to control the copyright on photographs.

“I would have been better off keeping them but since I was coming back I took the money.”

Back in Sydney, he developed a considerable reputation both in the advertising world and as a portrait photographer.

“I came back as a celebrity photographer but there were no celebrities to photograph,” he recalls.

More importantly, he began self-publishing books of his work, the first a career retrospective of his output between 1976 and 2013.

Three hundred pages of images from Esquire, Vogue and Rolling Stone, as well as album covers and movie posters.

To date, seven books have been printed, featuring portraits not only of people but also animals, flowers and birds, the latter particularly beautiful.

So exquisitely detailed are these images that one feels one can almost touch the page and ruffle soft breast feathers.

Pause here for a commercial break as our waiter Samuele embarks on a short commercial on behalf of the Italian Tourist Board and our conversation goes momentarily off the rails.

Stating the obvious, he tells us how beautiful Italy is, especially Lucca, which is one of the places I’ve never managed to visit but promise to do so.

“I just lost contact with my food,” says Heery as Samuele leaves.

We return to the subject of photography and the people in front of the lens.

Heery resumes his staccato, stream of consciousness delivery.

“Celebrities are so easy to direct. You can coax the personality out of them. They know who they are and how to project their image,” he said.

“The business of celebrity is so controlled. It’s really fashion photography. Everything’s under control. All about style. It’s different when you do real people. My book on Wayside Chapel was a real winner for me. Real people. I hate celebrity.

“I treat everyone the same. It’s my working class background. I do whatever works. Even if it means treading on toes. I can be provocative if I cover the gamut of emotions.”

Commentators, such as Edmund Capon, former director of the Art Gallery of NSW, take an intellectual view of Heery’s work.

“It is that subjective, responsive faculty which has guided Heery to articulate and examine his subjects, to engage with them, sense their distinctive qualities and massage them into compositions that satisfy not only as visual experiences but also as revelations of the soul,” wrote Capon in an introduction to a Heery book.

True, but what is winning about Heery is his Aussie directness.

“Don’t go past your intellectual abilities,” he said.

“I’ve had to give up a lot. My assistants can take good portraits now.”

Heery takes a moment to toy with his pasta before resuming chat.

About Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton, gods in the photography pantheon, and other lesser local souls.

“Avedon was a favourite of mine. And Penn. It was easier then to define who was a top photographer,” he said.

“There were fewer around, and I did admire Helmut Newton. I didn’t admire Annie Liebowitz.

“Her early pictures were great but she slipped into what I call the Vanity Fair formula. Her work is very flattering. That’s the nature of celebrity. It’s about vanity.”

He stops to reflect for a moment.

“Mate, if you want to keep working you’ve got to make people look good,” he said.

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Heery and Havekes live in Woollahra with their two daughters and a third from his previous marriage.

When he speaks of them his customary feistiness seems to evaporate.

Sentiment intrudes. He seems suddenly mellower. Unsurprising, as he’s just turned 70.

“Saskia is such a beautiful woman. Hard to believe she can go to the markets at 4am, work full on all day and then go out at seven or eight at night and look great,” he said.

“It’s her Dutch work ethic. She’s hard working. Like her father.”

With his next book, Collaborative Portraits, on the brink of release he’s already considering another.

“It will be called Harbour. I’m going to use an underwater camera strapped to the bottom of my boat to photograph images of Sydney Harbour,” he said.

“My boat is my biggest joy. It’s a fifties launch. I named it Jean after my mother.”

Finally our conversation drifts into a discussion of current politics, overseas — such as Trump and May, the Mexican wall and the doomed Brexit — and local quondam subjects.

These included Whitlam, Keating, Rudd and Turnbull and Heery liked them all, but divests himself of unprintable views of some of the less alluring current crop of conservatives.

“At heart, I’m just an old leftie,” he said.