Brett Phibbs takes on the essential service of documenting an unprecedented month in New Zealand history.
New Zealand Geographic publisher James Frankham on documenting Whakaari/White Island.
Talman Madsen fell in love with the stars before photography.
This issue’s feature on fishing was 12 months in the making.
Naomi Arnold takes up timbersports—very briefly.
Scouring Taupō’s silty bottom in search of spearfishers.
The hardest assignment in wildlife photography: lesser short-tailed bats.
Craig McKenzie stalks takahē in Te Anau.
Anke Richter has reported extensively on cults—and for the last six months, Gloriavale has been her focus.
The NZ-VR team is trying to make New Zealand more real, using virtual reality.
When the forecast is just right, Irene and Crispin Middleton wake up in the middle of the night and put to sea.
Retracing lives of long ago.
Telling stories about the overlooked and the unappreciated.
What Neil Silverwood learned out in the cold.
Charlotte Graham used to live on the top floor of a wooden house in Wellington. On November 14, 2016, two minutes after midnight, it began shaking so badly that she struggled to make it to the doorway to shelter. When the earthquake finally subsided, and she heard her flatmates return to bed, she wondered: Do we all need to evacuate? Head up Mt Victoria? She couldn’t find anything online about tsunami risk. Someone on Twitter sent her a map of Wellington council evacuation zones. It didn’t have street names, but she knew the city well enough to place her house in one of the safe zones. It made her wonder: What about people who didn’t use social media? Or the internet? A longterm Radio New Zealand producer, freelance journalist and community volunteer, Graham was well versed in earthquake reporting. She wanted to know what provisions were in place for the vulnerable in disaster planning in New Zealand, and whether the organisations looking after them were getting the same kind of help as quake-stricken businesses. “It became clear that the picture in Wellington was a lot more interesting than I’d first realised,” she says, “but also in the way that Wellington’s most vulnerable were not included.” In early 2017, she won a Scoop Foundation grant that enabled her to do the legwork of finding out more: “I ended up putting in an Official Information Act request to every council in New Zealand to find out what they actually had in documentation to address the safety of vulnerable people.” Councils were, by and large, baffled. No one had asked this before. Some have yet to furnish Graham with answers to questions first posed beginning in April 2016. It’s information she believes is vital. “You can ring a government department and ask for the national picture, but you’re not necessarily going to get the minutiae of the challenges that different areas are facing,” she says. Sometimes the reporting process is time-consuming and boringly administrative—and sometimes the outcome is vitally important. The result of Graham’s research, which has spanned eight months and counting, is a national picture of our disaster readiness, more detailed than ever before.
For five years Richard Robinson has been heading out into the blue realm far beyond our shores to photograph the pelagic creatures that live there. It wasn’t an assignment as such, but the beginning of a body of work propelled only by curiosity. He began accruing images of events that occur so rarely that few have had the opportunity to photograph them—orca hunting, the birth and first breath of a pilot whale, feeding frenzies that included several hundred animals. Soon, he had the kernel of an idea that began to coalesce around a working title, ‘Where the Buffalo Roam’—a reference to the American West that matched Robinson’s vision of this vast ocean prairie and its cast of leviathans. The project received two big boosts. First, researcher Jochen Zaeschmar allowed Robinson to accompany him on his many trips offshore, where the photographer took up a spotting position high in the crow’s nest. Later, Robinson won the inaugural Canon Personal Project Grant, enabling the completion of the project with the new 5D Mark IV. The coincidence of vision, curiosity and good fortune are captured in the pages of this issue: “Some of the best work of my life,” says Robinson.
Formerly the editor of Mana magazine, Leonie Hayden faced a unique set of challenges writing for a more mainstream audience in this magazine. “I was surprised by how many words and concepts common to Māori required definition,” she says. “I thought that ancestral maunga, the idea that a mountain can be more than mountain, was a concept that all New Zealanders understood. But despite hundreds of years of shared history, not everyone understands the physical and psychological connections to landmarks that are important to Māori.” This lack of understanding in language is also reflected in law, the ultimate construct of state. “But world views differ,” says Hayden. “Māori are unable to question it, and still have to play by the rules. We have to look to academic leaders to lead the conversation, to slowly translate and incorporate the Māori world view into the British legal system. But how do you even do that? It feels like a long and impossible task.” The SOUL protestors, profiled in her feature, are part of advancing that public discussion of difference, of redefining what it is to own land and what it is to belong to the land. “I’m not convinced that we’re very good at protecting our taonga,” she says. “In researching this I feel like Heritage New Zealand have let a lot of New Zealanders down. I don’t see how outcomes like this can protect special places. “Providing resources for people who are here right now is more important than what has gone before. You have to house and clothe people, and history won’t do that, but I hope that thinking of the past as a living thing will be a concept that’s relevant to more than only Māori.”
Photographing actors on the set of a Shakespeare play is a far cry from Peter Meecham’s last story for New Zealand Geographic. In 1992, he documented a 160-kilometre horseback journey through Central Otago for the magazine; 25 years later, he’s back, with the story of a four-month theatrical production in Auckland. Meecham, a photojournalist who works for a variety of newspapers, is more accustomed to spending time on the sidelines than in the wings, but the Pop-Up Globe and the passion of its cast and crew proved unexpectedly compelling. To his surprise, his 13-year-old son also took a liking to the plays, insisting on being his assistant in order to covertly watch the performances—and developing a brand-new interest in the arts. “He’s the captain of the open-weight under-13 rugby team in Auckland, he’s rugby-mad, he plays cricket, he watches basketball consistently on TV—it drives me nuts,” says Meecham. Meecham had a front-seat view of the evolution of the four plays, following them from previews through to closing nights. He saw jokes emerge and actors’ confidence grow, as the crew formed a tight-knit bond born of their marathon four months of shows. The plays may be 400 years old, but as Meecham and his son saw first-hand, they can still make an audience of a thousand people laugh.
Bryce McQuillan specialises in the tiny, the nocturnal and the cryptic.
Don Rowe goes bush with The Kiwi Bushman
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