Peter James Quinn

Peter James Quinn: New Zealanders in Focus

One of New Zealand’s preeminent social documentary photographers, Quinn’s moving visual studies shot over 20 years have provided a view of New Zealand in cross-section, offering insights into the nature of our familiar yet diverse and multi-layered society. His new book, published by New Zealand Geographic, is a selection of the best.

Written by       Photographed by Peter James Quinn

Perfect Place—On the wild West Coast, whitebaiting is almost a religion. Such is the fanaticism that “baiters” will remain on guard, sleeping beside their “possies” in rain or shine for the duration of the season. For Gary Forsyth, here poling his punt on the tide along the misty Okari River, it’s mornings like this that see baiters form deep attachments not just to the pastime but to the particular waterways they fish.
Superfluity of Saris—At the temporary Nanaksar temple in Manurewa, Sikh women take time out at the end of the Sunday service to catch up on weekly happenings in their community. Nanaksar is one of four gurdwaras—places of worship for Sikhs—in greater Auckland. A new temple now stands in place of this building, once a typical family home along Great South Road.
Make My Day—Upper Hutt bikie Jason Potter takes deadly aim, illustrating his natural propensity for violence against real or perceived enemies of his gang. In a strange twist of fate, an act of retaliation against the very motorcycle club he had supported backfired after this photograph was made. Seeking revenge for the theft of a large sum of cash by a fellow club member, Potter fashioned a home-made bomb to extract his own form of justice, but the device prematurely exploded, leaving him missing a hand.

From its inception in 1989, New Zealand Geographic magazine has sought to document the changing face of our nation, our environment and our people. Photography has been central to that task, but it is photography of a special kind. While almost any photographer can capture a revealing photo of an unfamiliar scene, creating an in­sightful image of the familiar is a different art entirely.

This is Peter Quinn’s great challenge every time he lifts the viewfinder to his eye. For two decades he has trained his lens upon the lives and circumstances of New Zealanders—in their homes, at their places of work, wor­ship or recreation. On each occasion he has attempted to tear away the gauze of familiarity that clouds our vision and reveal the nuanced, diverse and unique country and culture in which we live.

Few photographers approach their subjects with as much thought and discipline as does Quinn, a fact that will be evident in the selection of images in this book. These photographs were rarely stumbled upon serendipi­tously; rather, they were anticipated through research, predicted by a keen editorial instinct, and waited for—of­-ten for weeks or months—before circumstances aligned to provide the compelling image.

The documentary photographer doesn’t just capture light falling upon a scene, but is also called to examine that scene and its subjects critically, test its editorial merit and capture it with technical excellence. The result is an image of a specific moment that speaks to a general condition—1/125th of a second that represents a day, a year, a decade in the life of its subject.

Home on the Range—After 74 years on “the hill”, Welsh-born Dora Berdinner still cooks her meals, and warms her toes on the coal range of her Stockton home. The miner’s widow was one of the few residents left in the once-thriving coal-mining settlement when I arrived there to photograph in 1994.
Home on the Range—After 74 years on “the hill”, Welsh-born Dora Berdinner still cooks her meals, and warms her toes on the coal range of her Stockton home. The miner’s widow was one of the few residents left in the once-thriving coal-mining settlement when I arrived there to photograph in 1994.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, hailed by many as the father of modern photojournalism, said, “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.” The ability to anticipate and capture that moment is the hallmark of the finest documentary photographers, because, above all else, they are astute observers of people. Whether his subject is a neo-Nazi or a nun, Quinn assimilates himself within their environment and gets to know them as individuals, long before releasing the shutter at the “decisive moment”.

However, a magazine feature is not merely a collection of such moments, but rather a carefully chosen group of images whose size and sequence creates a visual narrative.

For the photographer, creating this narrative requires not only tenacity and patience but also the editorial vision to produce a suite of images that connect, one to the next, to tell the full story. Yet Quinn’s vision has always extended beyond this brief, because in his mind each commissioned feature was also part of a larger exploration of this coun­try’s sense of self. Each photograph captures a moment. Each moment frames a story. Each story constitutes a chapter in the visual discourse that has become a book— 162 images of us, the New Zealanders.

The result is not the contrived image promoted in trav­el brochures, but a warts-and-all reflection of the country and people without pretence or make-up, captured with candour, compassion and humour. It is also a collection the likes of which rarely reach bookshelves. In part this is because documentary photography is challenging, but also because the publishing industry has been forced to follow in the wake of internet culture, which acquires and dis­seminates images largely for free. This culture of free use will inevitably lead to a lack of critical photography.

Oyster Shucking—In 1993 I photographed blood-stained Base Westrupp at work on Kiteroa Station on the East Coast, where they still employed the quicker but cruder method of cut-and-bite during docking. Considered to carry less risk of infection than using rubber rings, the resulting “mountain oysters” are a local delicacy, as are the lambs’ tails, roasted in their skin over an open fire.
Oyster Shucking—In 1993 I photographed blood-stained Base Westrupp at work on Kiteroa Station on the East Coast, where they still employed the quicker but cruder method of cut-and-bite during docking.
Considered to carry less risk of infection than using rubber rings, the resulting “mountain oysters” are a local delicacy, as are the lambs’ tails, roasted in their skin over an open fire.

In a world of fragmentary, ubiquitous and personalised media, it is assumed that everybody will capture their own version of events, from their own perspective—a sort of visual democracy, a republic of pixels. But a quick check of Flickr will potently illustrate that this is not the case.

Pictures of sunrises, smiling friends and pets are a poor record of our evolving society. No number of camera-phone snaps can penetrate the social and physical environments into which Quinn has gone in search of his stories. Without a collective public mission to document society, and without the skill of photojournalists like Quinn to see beyond the immediate and the obvious, we are all the poorer.

The past shapes the present, and in his new book, New Zealanders in Focus, Quinn illuminates the social forces that have shaped our nation for the last two decades, as surely as the tectonic plates imperceptibly warp and recast our landscapes.