In the late 1970s Bob Brown, the then recently appointed director of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society, went to see photographer Peter Dombrovskis. Work had already began on the proposed Gordon-below Franklin dam site, anchorage points were being scouted, Dr Brown knew the campaign to save the Franklin had to step up.
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"I knew getting pictures out to Australians about what they were going to lose was key to the campaign so I went and saw Peter," Dr Brown said.
Dr Brown, who went on to become the Parliamentary Leader of the Greens, was launching Dombrovskis: Journeys into the Wild, an exhibition at the National Library of Australia, showcasing more than 70 images including the one that Dr Brown says saved a river.
"I asked Peter if he would consider rafting down the Franklin River to fetch photographs for the nation to see what it was about to lose," Dr Brown said on Wednesday.
Over the next three years, while the legal fight was continuing, Dombrovskis rafted solo down the Franklin, carrying all his camera gear, rolls of film, sometimes gone for weeks at time, travelling to remote places in the wildest of weather.
The pair, who went on to become firm friends, were looking through transparencies in the early 1980s when Dombrovskis put Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend, Franklin River on the lightbox.
"As soon as I saw it I jumped to my feet and went, 'Peter, that's it!'," says Dr Brown.
"The Franklin has many moods but if you were going to encapsulate them into one, there it is.
"It's both lyrical and majestic and this area would have been entirely flooded by the Gordon-below-Franklin dam. It had all the elements we needed.
"All Peter said was 'That's not my best picture'."
The photograph would go on to be reproduced a million times during the last four years of the No Dams campaign, on pamphlets, on t-shirts, on stickers, and on election posters.
In 1983 the High Court ruled the dam would not be built.
In 1984 Dombrovskis wrote that "photography is, quite simply, a means of communicating my concern for the beauty of the earth."
And Dr Brown believes this is what drew the two of them together.
"I'm an activist and a public exponent but Peter was a campaigner whose voice was the pictures he produced.
"I was as shy as he was and our reserve was emboldened by the beauty of the natural world which was so threatened at the time. We had a complementary reason for overcoming our reserve. We just clicked."
Matthew Jones, the senior curator of the exhibition, said the library holds more than 3000 Dombrovskis images in its archives, donated in 2009.
The exhibition flows through the Tasmanian wilderness, from the ocean, through the forests and rivers, finishing with the snow-capped peaks.
"We wanted to celebrate the contribution Peter made to saving these wild places but also what a magnificent artist he was and what a wonderful photographer he was and how unique his process and photographs were," Mr Jones said.
In 1996, while working near Mount Hayes, in south-west Tasmania's Western Arthur Range, Dombrovskis suffered a heart attack and died. He was 51 years old.
Dombrovskis: Journeys into the Wild runs at the National Library of Australia until January 30, 2018.
To complement the exhibition a stunning book, Journeys into the Wild: The photography of Peter Dombrovskis, with an introduction by Bob Brown, NLA Publishing, $39.99, is available now.
In Saturday's Panorama magazine: Into the Wild
