90
PETER IRELAND
I do not dream of Sussex Downs,
Or quaint old English quaint old towns,
I think of what may yet be seen
In Johnsonville and Geraldine.
Denis Glover, Home Thoughts (1936)
In the mid-1960s a rookie photographer called John
B. Turner roamed the streets of a plain Wellington
suburb taking photographs of the built environment.
Johnsonville then was experiencing a growth spurt
which saw its population increase by nearly 40 per
cent in the decade between 1956 and 1966. Until the
later 1930s it had been a small, semi-rural settlement
adjacent to the capital, but from 1938 it became the
site of the new Labour government’s expanding
housing scheme and it rapidly transformed into a
dormitory suburb populated by young families,
accruing the name of ‘nappy valley’, and attracting
small businesses to support the rising population. It
was quintessentially suburban, and became almost
a symbol of such in newspaper reporting and in
our literature. Socially and geographically it was
somewhere between posh Khandallah and poor
Porirua.
A recent publication from Te Papa Press^1 charts
Turner’s progress from bewildered amateur
photographer to a seminal figure in raising national
awareness to the medium’s significance in and for this
country over the past half-century. This continuing
Back Story
John B. Turner’s Johnsonville Series
latter role has tended to mask his own pursuits as a
photographer, so that this Johnsonville series—his first
coherent project as a documentary photographer, and
a pivotal development in our photographic history—
is only now, nearly 60 years later, being profiled. It has
never been published or exhibited as a series, either
whole or in part.^2
Why? The wider and complex backstory is ably
outlined at appropriate length in editor Athol
McCredie’s introduction to The New Photography
already mentioned, but Turner’s specific case
demands further elucidation. McCredie’s opening
statement: ‘This book is about the beginnings of
contemporary photography—also known as art
photography—in New Zealand’^3 glides over an
immense practical dilemma for anyone presently
identifying as a documentary photographer (to the
point that some, for commercial and career reasons,
actively avoid being identified as such). Given the
complexity of this situation it is understandable
the author employs such a simplistic conflation of
‘contemporary’ with ‘art photography’, even when his
subject matter in this book is wholly based within the
documentary tradition.
But, importantly, the distinction is made between
the visual documenting occurring in the nineteenth
century—when projects recorded material progress
‘objectively’—and the approach by post-WWII
photographers which ‘showed the world “out there”,
as chanced on by the photographer, rather than