I am back home, trying to readjust to another frozen Methven winter, and assimilate an overdose of creative stimulation gained from a 2500 km road trip over 23 days in southeast Australia.  As much as we kiwis like to ‘compete’ with our neighbours across the ditch we have no match for the amount of artwork they have everywhere.  The wealth of their country and the amount  of money it allows to be spent on public artwork collections has generated a cycle of creativity we can only admire with a hint of envy.  I especially like the way photography is respected as an artistic form, rather than being seen purely as a recording medium.   As a reminder to myself I want to detail a few highlights.

Melbourne: a visit to the NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) was worth the trip alone to see the Timelines exhibit. I could identify with the opening blurb:Time is a slippery notion. It is everywhere and always moving but this powerful regulating force cannot be seen. It is only apparent in context: in the changing seasons, in another wrinkle on our faces, in the growth of children. Photography has a unique role to play in our sometimes poignant sense of time passing. The camera’s ability to depict ‘a moment in time’ – to stop the clock for a brief moment – gives photographs a unique capacity to direct our consideration towards the mechanics and poetics of this pervasive and mysterious cosmic force.It was a brilliant collection of work including photographs from Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, Bill Brandt, Ruth Maddison, Rod McNicol and Rosemary Laing.

Bendigo: Where, you say?  It’s a nice town north of Melbourne, not a huge place by any means, but a destination because an ex-Lincoln friend of mine lives there.  But its local art gallery had collections of old masters and contemporary art that would put our big centres to shame – just another indicator of how valued art is in Australia.  And in nearly every gallery we saw school classes using the resources.

Sydney: what a creative hotbed this place is. My main focus was to see an exhibition of Bill Henson’s photography.  He would be Australias most respected photographic artist, and was great to see his large prints – around a metre square – selling for $30,000 each. And yes they were selling, 19 red dots at the time we visited.  I had a special interest in his work as an acquaintance of mine, creative and technical genius Les Walkling, is a long time friend of  Hensons and had quite a bit to do with him changing from fibre paper-based prints to digital pigment prints (the same system I use). Another of Les Walklings collaborators is very well respected, Poli Papapetrou.  I was excited to find her new exhibition had just opened at the Stills Gallery in Paddington.  I had seen early proofs of some of these prints at one of Les’s fine art print workshops so was thrilled to see the finished articles.  Poli’s work really does set my mind off, very though provoking. As a bonus we caught the end and beginning of two exhibitions at the Australian Centre for Photography.  They were portrait oriented, printed beautifully. Just another reminder of how valued photography is across the shores.

After all that stimulation I feel the need push my own photography a bit more; I have plenty of themes to keep photographing but need to work on getting more images printed and displayed. I have plans for a website upgrade but more urgently am anxious to get our new house with gallery/studio space built. Final plans are almost complete, hopefully construction will start soon.

Raewyn Hillier on Latitude cover Winter 2010

Another cover on Latitude mag: over the last couple of months I’ve had fun photographing Raewyn Hillier.  She is a very interesting woman, recently seen with husband John on a  ‘Country Calendar’  episode featuring their high country hunting / guiding business.  I also photographed her working with Erewhon’s clydesdale horse team, riding her Harley and working at her day job as a flooring consultant in Christchurch.  It’s worth buying the mag just to read this article and see my photos of her!

We have settled in well to our slow tour of NZ, constantly surprised at our discoveries. The South Island really is a great place to live in and be able to photograph. I haven’t quite figured out the disconnect of what I personally find interesting, and what the average tourist here does (or is steered towards by the marketers). A couple of hours in Queenstown, mecca for all visitors, is more than enough to me. Sure it is surrounded by beautiful scenery, but so is most of the island, in a less frenzied way.

What really catches my eye are the unique little buildings and establishments with personality. While heading from Queenstown to Gore we stopped in the little settlement of Athol. An intriguing building promised ‘Bed & Breakfast, coffee, hot chocolate’ as well as artworks. Inside we met the owner, a real character, who was busy working away in his studio out the back. Definitely more interesting to me than the average tourist shop.

Red Barn Studio, Athol

I am sitting in a backpacker’s hostel overlooking Wanaka right now, cataloging and backing up a stash of images from the last few days. We just biked the 160 km Otago Rail Trail over four days. The weather wasn’t the best for comfort – norwest headwind on day 1, freezing rain on day 2, more wind on day 3 then finally a good tailwind on the last day – but is did create some magnificent light and sky landscapes. I hauled a stripped down camera kit (one body & 3 lenses) but it still seemed like more weight than I needed at times.

While on the trail we met many interesting people. A chance encounter with two traveling English photographers in the Ranfurly pub ended up with us comparing thoughts and ideas all evening. Escaping from the freezing rain to the warm reception by Ken & Helen at Glen Ida. A random encounter with a young woman who quit her job in the US a year ago and is now peddling her way around the world with only what she can carry on her bike. And of course the other rail trail bikers including our near neighbour Dave.

The plan is to carry on around the south for a while (autumn colour in Arrowtown is high on the list) then work our way north, maybe up the west Coast. I’m enjoying being able to carry out most of my essential work on the go; a couple of hard drives with copies of my entire archive and a very good laptop. Well it hardly qualifies as a laptop – an 18.4″ AW series Sony Vaio – not something you would open up seated on a plane! But it does have an amazing screen, one of the few that faithfully displays a full Adobe RGB colour gamut and has enough screen real estate to enable accurate image editing unlike most laptops. With this and a mobile wireless router I’m still in business while on the road.

Change is good – getting out of the usual routines definitely sparks the creative juice.

Cloud and road converge on the rail trail

Today Bruce Redmond proved he is the best ploughman in the world with a big win in the 2-day World Ploughing Competition held in Methven. It has been a huge event for Methven with competitors from all over the world converging here. Bruce thoroughly deserved the win. I spent the last hour of the competition fixed in a prime spot photographing only him and was surprised that maistream media were busy elsewhere – so I’m confident I have the best photographic record of New Zealand’s latest World Champion!

Bruce Redmond ploughing champion, Methven

The best ploughman in the world at work

Bruce Redmond, World Champion, with the trophy to prove it

Mt Hutt, late spring snow

Another find in my folder of ‘files to work on’ was an image I captured a few months ago.  It is from one of my nearby locations that I regularly visit to photograph.  It is always interesting to see how different the same composition can look under different light.  This day there was a combination of a late spring dump of snow, a setting moon, wonderful early light on soft clouds and content sheep grazing.  As I type this I have a 1 metre wide print on canvas emerging from my printer, it looks great.

Late light, Glenfalloch

I am still working through a backlog of photographs taken a while ago on a trip into the backcountry of the Rakaia river – this one caught some very special light one evening.  I have printed it along with some other new material to freshen up my collection at the Icehouse Gallery.

Sunrise, Glenfalloch

In this month’s NZ Geographic there is a large fold out map of Canterbury.  One of my Glenfalloch images was used for the information panels on the reverse.

Nancy Tichborne, artist and gardener

If you have any interest in expansive gardens find a copy of this month’s Latitude mag. I photographed 3 of the gardens featured, including the cover shot of Nancy. It was a bit of an eye opener for me seeing just how creative (and maybe a little obsessed!) gardeners can become, I suppose it is just like any other creative outlet you become passionate about.

We are just days away from moving out of our house to a small rental while we build our next new house. You may have heard that we are taking the opportunity of a disrupted year to have a good look around NZ, I’m really looking forward to having the time to see and photograph all the quiet little places I usually race through without stopping. I plan to build up a collection of photographs of NZ in 2010, a slice of real New Zealand rather than the normal glossy over the top images we usually see. These images can look a bit underwhelming at the time but several years down the track it’s interesting to see how we change. One of my all time favourite publications is Robin Morrison’s ‘South Island from the Road’, a collection of photographs from around 1980.

Regarding the above photo, when I photographed it last week I couldn’t help but compare it to one I posted a few weeks ago of a blue car outside our garage in Methven. Two photographs of cars outside garage workshops in two little country towns, not very far apart. Similar but not. Life is full of contrast!