I went through all those earthquake drills as a youngster and when I needed them at 4.35 am this morning just lay in bed trying to wake up, wondering why the whole house was jumping around! Luckily no real damage here, images from Christchurch looking rather surreal though with many older buildings partially crumbling. In Methven both the Brown & Blue pubs lost chimneys, shop stock was shaken up a bit but could have been a lot worse.
Two things I learnt: first, I finally understand the power and use of Twitter for immediate news. Within minutes a stream of reports and photos were appearing, being re-tweeted around the world. An iphone linked to Twitter account would be the best reportage tool to dominate immediate news. Second, NZ (I guess Auckland based) TV was so slow to pick up on anything, CNN was reporting within 20 minutes, NZ TV was at least a couple of hours later. Pretty slack really.
Firemen clean up broken chimneys from the Brown Pub after this morning's earthquake
Methven beat Southern, 2010 Watters Cup rugby
Whenever there is something interesting going on in Methven, if I go I usually can’t help but take a camera and do some visual push-ups. I just enjoy photographing nearly everything (except weddings). These photos don’t usually have any apparent use – so I’m thinking about making a home for them on my website, sort of a visual diary of local life. The page is not officially part of my website yet but can be found here for now. The initial photos are from yesterdays Watters Cup rugby final where Methven had a good win over Southern.
Wedding, 1910
At the moment I’m scanning some photos from my fathers collection for a book he has written, and came across this one: his parent’s wedding day exactly 100 years ago in 1910. I’m pleasantly surprised at what good condition the print is in, and how well it was photographed, no doubt with a large plate camera. I can look at this photograph 100 years after it was taken and feel I know a little bit about people I never met.
It made me think about today, how everyone is a photographer of some description, using cellphones to grab blurry images for Facebook or whatever. But how many of these are valued or kept after their 5 minutes of fame? Most are lost, deleted, or even end up saved on media that will be unreadable in a decade – how many of us have old floppy discs lying around? How often to you hear someone’s laptop died and they lost all their photos? Digital is great but unless you keep backing up onto the current media they won’t be here in 100 years – not to mention the issue of different software and file types rendering old data unreadable.
The best way to preserve images is to print them – and get good prints on archival materials. In scanning my father’s prints it’s so obvious how the studio prints from 100 years ago are still far superior to some of the cheap colour prints from not too long ago, massive fading and colour shifts are going on. Quality today is a mixed bag, professional lab prints to archival standards are extremely stable but those from home printers can look horrible in a few short years. Like most things, you get what you pay for.
Of course a lot of photos taken today won’t be missed if they aren’t preserved, quantity of images doesn’t translate to quality. Here’s a plug for those professional photographers out there who’s business it is to create the photos that will be here in another 100 years – it’s what they do for a living so naturally their images should stand out. If you want to find a real NZIPP qualified professional near you go here
I’ve been keeping a low profile lately, business interrupted with travel and house building but the good news is we have our new house/studio plans finished, building consent issued and builder sorted. I can’t wait to have my new studio, it is built to make full use of natural light, my favourite. Watch this space!
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.