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Bruce Connew is a New Zealand photographer and
artist who has made images since the early 1970s.
He earned wide respect for his work with the New
Zealand Listener before setting afloat his independent,
project-based work with the 1985 book and exhibition
series South Africa. His photographic practice evinces a
fascination with language and storytelling, expressing
itself in a wide variety of modes. In some cases his
photographs complement another writer’s story, or
rather the writer’s story complements his series, while
in other instances he is the author. Some projects
include no text at all. His current project about the
New Zealand Wars centres around photographing
the text that appears on gravestones and memorials,
which is an unusual way of combining textual
and visual elements. I asked him how he decided
what kind of text should go with a given set of
photographs? Did he typically start with the images
and then develop a text, or do the two emerge
simultaneously?
Bruce Connew: My processes have remained pretty
much the same since my first social and political
project. I have read, and continue to, extensively and
eclectically. Many moons ago, I eschewed university
for a woolstore, after a fabulous last year at school
where, in English and History, vigorous opinions
counted for more than irritating facts. I have in my
wake all manner of occupations, some unpleasant,
some uplifting, and always amongst people, working
people to professional, and a plethora in between.
I skirmished at an art school south of London for a
single year, when I very vaguely figured photography
could be my means of expression. Art-school tutors
and their exasperating exercises weren’t for me. I
chose to endlessly hang out in the school’s wondrous
library, kicking off in one corner and reading my way
around the shelves for months and months, anything
and everything, books of photography, books about
photography, and plenty beyond: from Henri Cartier-
Bresson images, Robert Frank’s The Americans, not
quite grasping either, to a swashbuckling David
Douglas Duncan’s Yankee Nomad, to Words and Pictures
by Wilson Hicks; R. Smith Schumann’s Photographic
Communication led to Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and
Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers. And then there were Man
Ray, Callahan, Minor White, Brassaï, Cunningham,
Dorothea Lange, Julia Margaret Cameron, Gertrude
Käsebier, Walker Evans, Atget, Uelsmann, Koudelka,
Weston, Stieglitz, Arbus, Eisenstaedt, McCullin,
Eugene Smith, Gordon Parks and many more, a
bringing to light.
The Poetics of Music, a paperback book of a series
of lectures delivered by Igor Stravinsky at Harvard
University in 1939–40, presented itself one morning.
While dealing with the philosophy of music was very
far from my capacity, I flicked open the pages andOblong as an Egg,
Flat as a Stone, Deep as a Jungle
Bruce Connew Talks with Sophia Powers