JOHN FIELDS, FATHER AND DAUGHTER, EAST CAPE, 1969
JOHN DALEY, TEED STREET AND BROADWAY, NEWMARKET, AUCKLAND, 1969FOCUS | ATHOL MCCREDIE
“The photography in the book is work I was seeing in my
formative early 20s,” Athol says, “so I was keen to revisit it as
a way of understanding my own life more. But I think it goes
wider than just me: there is always that point where the present
becomes history as people pass away, memories dim, and social
and cultural concerns move on.
“Only then can we, as a society, begin to get a proper perspective
on a particular moment.”
Offering an informed start to gaining that perspective, Athol
puts forward eight photographers who were shooting through
the late ’60s and the ’70s to represent the archetype of an
emerging new photography: Gary Baigent, Richard Collins,
John Daley, John Fields, Max Oettli, John B Turner, Len Wesney,
and Ans Westra. These photographers began sharing their
personal experiences through photography from a time when
pictorialism was New Zealand’s imaging bread and butter, the
art world was uninterested in the bastard stepchild it had birthed
with technology, and Brian Brake was the globetrotting local boy
made good.
“I guess these photographers were less recognized than Brake
because their work was more radical and harder for most people
to relate to then,” explains Athol, “but I think audiences have
become more sophisticated today and can accept and enjoy
it more readily. I’ve been quite surprised by how much young
people seem to love it.”
That appeal to the youth may not be so surprising when you
consider how important youthfulness was to the photographers
at the time. Almost all of the artists in The New Photography
came of age in the ’60s — a time when counterculture peaked
among the youth — and lived for some time in the country’s
major metropolitan areas. It was the time and place of personal
exploration and self-expression.
“You only have to think of pottery making, weaving, jewellery,
and printmaking all taking off in the 1960s and ’70s,” Athol
recalls, “and the catchphrase, ‘Do your own thing’. The younger
generation weren’t interested in having culture handed down to
them from on high; they wanted to make it themselves.
“Even my photographers who lived more conventional lifestyles
couldn’t help being influenced by this new attitude.”
Although the young photographers were clearly switched
on to what was happening around them, culture was not
so instantaneously global as today. While the youth-culture
wave of the ’60s might have hit, it didn’t bring with it the