New Zealand Photographs
Damian Skinner
A man walks out of a public bar onto the street of a small town which is empty of people. His tie and white collar tell us something about him, as does his purposeful stride towards the camera. But in many ways this is an ambiguous image. The artist doesn’t help us much, the title Eketahuna doing little more than providing location and activating any cultural resonance that this name might have as an archetypal small town.
In 1979 Lucien Rizos set out to photographically document New Zealand. Working in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Rizos had the opportunity to tour the country, carrying his camera and making images of the people and culture that he encountered along the way. Over the space of four years, he shot over 24,000 photographs on 680 rolls of film. From the beginning Rizos intended to produce a book that would capture his feelings about New Zealand. Looking past contemporary trends in photography here and overseas, Rizos emulated the example of Robert Frank, whose book The Americans had been published a generation before, in 1958. Keeping The Americans firmly in mind, Rizos set out to represent the ordinariness of everyday life in Godzone, while also being aware of the isolation and tensions of social life in New Zealand.
This is no picture postcard New Zealand, and it was less a celebration than an expose – the original title of the book, taken from a sign that Rizos saw on sale in Whitcombes and Tombs, was ‘Hands off other people’s food’. Using a Leica M3 camera and black and white 35 mm film, Rizos took 400 ASA film and rated it at 200, which produces the characteristic greyness of these images, as if New Zealand in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a land of endless overcast days. This blandness was deliberate, the way Rizos managed his protest against the graphic, iconic effect of the documentary photography he resisted.
As a result, Rizos’s photographs work their effects slowly. And what effect they do have is enhanced by the way these sixty-six photographs have been filtered with the benefit of hindsight. Almost three decades later, Rizos has been able to clearly see the themes of his photographic project: individuals, the society in which they live and work, and the relationships that they have with others. In the context of Lucien Rizos’s photographs of New Zealand, this nameless man walking out of a public bar becomes an archetype – the man alone, the drinking man, the disconnected man. Rizos gives us the life of this man, the places he frequents, the houses he lives in, the community that he is, however awkwardly, part of. This man has many faces. In some photographs he is middle aged, in others he is old, and in still others he is young, a teenager. Sometimes he is unaccompanied, sometimes he is with other people. But he is always alone emotionally, and he never touches anyone else. He is not a man who readily expresses affection to his wife and children. In one photograph this man stands outside his house with his two kids, his posture and body language a brilliant and painful demonstration of the gap between him and other people. He just doesn’t know what to do with his hands, with his arms.
For me, a child when these photographs were taken and an adult in what seems to be another world entirely, Rizos’s New Zealand photographs are striking for their resonance in the present. A time capsule from the past, these images speed through time to become visible in the year 2010. Much has changed, and so much hasn’t. Take the issue of race relations and the awkward connections between Māori and Pākehā that is another major theme in this book. A Māori woman sits in a cafe, nursing her baby on her lap, her posture and facial expression an eloquent if mute expression of her unease, of a tension that Rizos wants us to understand as a larger if invisible force in society. In a triptych of images, the ubiquitous woollen jersey manages to both establish relationships between cultures – the Pākehā man looking at fruit, and the Māori man sitting in a car both wear this item of clothing – and the lack of authentic connection: the photograph in the middle of this sequence shows the same jersey hanging in a souvenir shop, under a Māori carving, the proximity of objects just emphasising the gap between them.
Rizos interprets this sequence quite bluntly: Māori end up wearing it. This is his take on the dynamics of colonisation, the effects of the rapid urbanisation of Māori in the 1950s and 1960s. Rizos’s photographs track the implications of government policy (or its lack), and of the dominant Pākehā attitudes towards race relations. The jersey is a symbol of a supposed assimilation that doesn’t really take. As Michael King writes in The Penguin History of New Zealand (2003), ‘It was assumed, erroneously, that those who grew up feeling “less Maori” than their parents and grandparents would by that very fact become “more European”. Instead, many such people simply grew up in a cultural vacuum and felt directionless and detached from the society into which they emerged as adults’. This is Rizos’s vision of the time and place of New Zealand in the late 1970s, the Māori dimension of a larger malaise that he felt was manifest across different sectors of Godzone, affecting Māori and Pākehā differently, but present all the same.
Looking at this sequence now, I’m not sure that I see it in quite the same way. Can the jersey work also as a symbol of agency, something that, in unexpected contrast to the carving in the souvenir shop, embodies an aspect of Māori lived experience, alive precisely because it is culturally awkward and ambiguous? The difference is, in fact, one of location. In the late 1970s when these photographs were taken, it was impossible to escape the conclusion that things were bad, with little hope of change. In the present, some things have changed quite a lot, which makes the jersey and this triptych of images available in another way entirely. As urban Māori culture has evolved and become an important force within New Zealand national culture, articulating its concerns through a variety of cultural means, some of which have nothing to do with visible ties to Māori art, the jersey says as much, and potentially a lot more, than the souvenir, even though one claims a more obvious relationship to ‘tradition’ than the other.
Yet whatever conclusion you draw about such things, the value of Rizos’s photographs is that they upset any smug conclusions about how much better things are in the present. We, unlike the people who populate these images, are clothed in labels and styles that declare a much greater trade with the rest of the world, in contrast to the home- and hand-made garments of this moment in our past. The horrors of Robert Muldoon’s time seem far away in the present, when a good coffee is available in most small towns, and culture, just like the relationship between Māori and Pākehā, has undergone some radical transformations. But the troublesome aspects of our country strike a surprisingly familiar note. I am both encouraged and unsettled by Rizos’s photographs, which ultimately means I am challenged by the idea that we might create a future in which, finally, this vision of New Zealand will recede into the past.
Damian Skinner
A man walks out of a public bar onto the street of a small town which is empty of people. His tie and white collar tell us something about him, as does his purposeful stride towards the camera. But in many ways this is an ambiguous image. The artist doesn’t help us much, the title Eketahuna doing little more than providing location and activating any cultural resonance that this name might have as an archetypal small town.
In 1979 Lucien Rizos set out to photographically document New Zealand. Working in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Rizos had the opportunity to tour the country, carrying his camera and making images of the people and culture that he encountered along the way. Over the space of four years, he shot over 24,000 photographs on 680 rolls of film. From the beginning Rizos intended to produce a book that would capture his feelings about New Zealand. Looking past contemporary trends in photography here and overseas, Rizos emulated the example of Robert Frank, whose book The Americans had been published a generation before, in 1958. Keeping The Americans firmly in mind, Rizos set out to represent the ordinariness of everyday life in Godzone, while also being aware of the isolation and tensions of social life in New Zealand.
This is no picture postcard New Zealand, and it was less a celebration than an expose – the original title of the book, taken from a sign that Rizos saw on sale in Whitcombes and Tombs, was ‘Hands off other people’s food’. Using a Leica M3 camera and black and white 35 mm film, Rizos took 400 ASA film and rated it at 200, which produces the characteristic greyness of these images, as if New Zealand in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a land of endless overcast days. This blandness was deliberate, the way Rizos managed his protest against the graphic, iconic effect of the documentary photography he resisted.
As a result, Rizos’s photographs work their effects slowly. And what effect they do have is enhanced by the way these sixty-six photographs have been filtered with the benefit of hindsight. Almost three decades later, Rizos has been able to clearly see the themes of his photographic project: individuals, the society in which they live and work, and the relationships that they have with others. In the context of Lucien Rizos’s photographs of New Zealand, this nameless man walking out of a public bar becomes an archetype – the man alone, the drinking man, the disconnected man. Rizos gives us the life of this man, the places he frequents, the houses he lives in, the community that he is, however awkwardly, part of. This man has many faces. In some photographs he is middle aged, in others he is old, and in still others he is young, a teenager. Sometimes he is unaccompanied, sometimes he is with other people. But he is always alone emotionally, and he never touches anyone else. He is not a man who readily expresses affection to his wife and children. In one photograph this man stands outside his house with his two kids, his posture and body language a brilliant and painful demonstration of the gap between him and other people. He just doesn’t know what to do with his hands, with his arms.
For me, a child when these photographs were taken and an adult in what seems to be another world entirely, Rizos’s New Zealand photographs are striking for their resonance in the present. A time capsule from the past, these images speed through time to become visible in the year 2010. Much has changed, and so much hasn’t. Take the issue of race relations and the awkward connections between Māori and Pākehā that is another major theme in this book. A Māori woman sits in a cafe, nursing her baby on her lap, her posture and facial expression an eloquent if mute expression of her unease, of a tension that Rizos wants us to understand as a larger if invisible force in society. In a triptych of images, the ubiquitous woollen jersey manages to both establish relationships between cultures – the Pākehā man looking at fruit, and the Māori man sitting in a car both wear this item of clothing – and the lack of authentic connection: the photograph in the middle of this sequence shows the same jersey hanging in a souvenir shop, under a Māori carving, the proximity of objects just emphasising the gap between them.
Rizos interprets this sequence quite bluntly: Māori end up wearing it. This is his take on the dynamics of colonisation, the effects of the rapid urbanisation of Māori in the 1950s and 1960s. Rizos’s photographs track the implications of government policy (or its lack), and of the dominant Pākehā attitudes towards race relations. The jersey is a symbol of a supposed assimilation that doesn’t really take. As Michael King writes in The Penguin History of New Zealand (2003), ‘It was assumed, erroneously, that those who grew up feeling “less Maori” than their parents and grandparents would by that very fact become “more European”. Instead, many such people simply grew up in a cultural vacuum and felt directionless and detached from the society into which they emerged as adults’. This is Rizos’s vision of the time and place of New Zealand in the late 1970s, the Māori dimension of a larger malaise that he felt was manifest across different sectors of Godzone, affecting Māori and Pākehā differently, but present all the same.
Looking at this sequence now, I’m not sure that I see it in quite the same way. Can the jersey work also as a symbol of agency, something that, in unexpected contrast to the carving in the souvenir shop, embodies an aspect of Māori lived experience, alive precisely because it is culturally awkward and ambiguous? The difference is, in fact, one of location. In the late 1970s when these photographs were taken, it was impossible to escape the conclusion that things were bad, with little hope of change. In the present, some things have changed quite a lot, which makes the jersey and this triptych of images available in another way entirely. As urban Māori culture has evolved and become an important force within New Zealand national culture, articulating its concerns through a variety of cultural means, some of which have nothing to do with visible ties to Māori art, the jersey says as much, and potentially a lot more, than the souvenir, even though one claims a more obvious relationship to ‘tradition’ than the other.
Yet whatever conclusion you draw about such things, the value of Rizos’s photographs is that they upset any smug conclusions about how much better things are in the present. We, unlike the people who populate these images, are clothed in labels and styles that declare a much greater trade with the rest of the world, in contrast to the home- and hand-made garments of this moment in our past. The horrors of Robert Muldoon’s time seem far away in the present, when a good coffee is available in most small towns, and culture, just like the relationship between Māori and Pākehā, has undergone some radical transformations. But the troublesome aspects of our country strike a surprisingly familiar note. I am both encouraged and unsettled by Rizos’s photographs, which ultimately means I am challenged by the idea that we might create a future in which, finally, this vision of New Zealand will recede into the past.
