The village is Te Atatu Peninsula, in West Auckland, New Zealand. Te Atatu means ‘the dawn’ in Maori, and that is the community I lived in for 15 years before moving to the Chinese capital, Beijing, after I retired from teaching photography at the University of Auckland at the end of 2011.
Te Atatu Peninsula is four kilometers long by two kilometers at its widest stretch. Because its flat land mass is so clearly defined by the Henderson Creek boundary in the west and Waitemata Harbour in the east, everything on the peninsula is within easy walking distance and lends itself to the possibility of something approaching a full photographic documentation of its physical appearance. As a photographer, my interest was in both the place itself, and the people who make it a unique community with its own distinctive history and character.
Rather than working on grand or esoteric themes, I like to photograph ordinary, everyday family life and events in the time-honoured tradition of the amateur photographer. Basically, I like to photograph what I like to photograph, rather than be told what to photograph by clients or editors. Because of my interest in social history and the history of photography, however, I am acutely aware that many aspects of our lives and times do not get recorded, or perhaps, do not get photographed as well as they deserve. Consequently, it is the myriad of small un-newsworthy everyday encounters that make up so much of our lives, that interest me most. In the past, since the 1960s, I had on and off documented aspects of the places I had lived, in black and white. Enticed by the advantaged of a digital camera Te Atatu Peninsula became the subject of my first major colour essay.
Although I have written books on the history of New Zealand photography and as a teacher and editor (PhotoForum magazine, established 1974) I have helped many photographers to make their own books, this is my first book of personal photographs. My influences, going back more than 55 years, include a long list of photographers who photographed the places they lived in that were familiar rather than exotic. They go back to John Thomson’s and Bill Brandt’s London, Eugene Atget’s Paris, Josef Sudek’s Prague, Berenice Abbott’s and Andre Kertesz’s New York, and Dorothea Lange’s California. And to the Paris of Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson. But also some pioneering New Zealand photographers like Dr A. C. Barker and the Tyree brothers who were part of the change they recorded.
One of my first successful Te Atatu pictures, from which the title of this book came, was the detail of the frontage of Te Atatu Meats, which by then had lost its way as reputedly the oldest and best butcher shop in town. I say successful because the picture pleases me. The shop delighted me with its loud and colourful presence — more a hint of Europe or Mexico than the usually subdued New Zealand palette. And I enjoyed its self-deprecating humour: “Fresh Pavlova (with Cream)” and “We sell meat too” emphasized with an eyeless smiley mouth. This is local folk art on display: somebody decided on the colour scheme and somebody with a sense of humour wrote the words. It is also a poignant comment on how business was doing, and concrete evidence of the owner’s decline of interest in it. The message is richly layered, when one thinks about it, and is not as jolly as the bright colours suggest.
The way I had truncated the shop’s name in my camera’s frame, making the words “Te Atatu Me,” was something that grew on me as a succinct and accurate title for this picture essay. Although my fundamental aim—my documentary purpose—was to capture something of the look and nature of this place and its people for posterity, inevitably, the pictures also saying something about me as well. Viewers are seeing not only an optical rendering of what I noticed when I made the picture, but perhaps also some meaningful details, correspondences, or revelations discovered and approved of after the event.
My hope is that these photographs, as visible evidence of this typical urban New Zealand village, will prove useful for future generations to better understand something of the history of this place. And, of course, I also hope that these photographs can be enjoyed as pictures in their own right.
The photographs in my book were chosen from over 20,000 selected digital images made over a seven year period from 2005 to 2011 on this self-assigned part-time project. These are photographs more or less of and from the street: of shops and shopkeepers, old buildings and new, and just some of the interesting people I’ve encountered.
A book of this kind cannot include all of the events that I have photographed, let alone the astonishing variety of activities that take place in the community, but key annual commemorations and celebrations such as Anzac Day and the Christmas Parade could not be excluded. Nor could the signal Te Atatu Pony Club meetings or annual Mud Run be missed, along with musical entertainments, Easter celebrations and other community activities, including the Saturday markets and garage sales.
Domestic and commercial architecture, and the phenomenon of infill housing were other aspects that I was particularly interested in documenting because they reflect the changing economic as well as social situation locally and throughout the country. So too does the turnover of business premises that can change hands and function almost overnight. They represent the cusp of the cycle of dashed hopes and fresh dreams; of speculative imagination and innovation coming up against inadequate finance, a saturated market, or mistimed or misjudged potential that typically force change in communities throughout New Zealand, and the rest of the world.
Overall, it is the small town unpretentiousness of this urban village and its people that particularly appealed to me. The basic character of Te Atatu Peninsula: its rural beginning, its development as a working class suburb in the 1950s, its increasingly multicultural and middle class nature and growing population, including more retirees, can be seen as a microcosm of New Zealand society. It echoes the demographic of the greater West Auckland area, and mirrors both fundamental and cosmetic changes taking place in New Zealand society today.
© John B Turner, 2015
BOOK
Te Atatu Me: photographs of an urban New Zealand village
Photographsby John B Turner
TURNER PHOTOBOOKS / PHOTOFORUM INC
ISBN 978-0-9597818-7-8
April 2015
176p, 168 photographs, 7 illustrations,
215 x 285 mm
Hardcover
RRP NZ $60 including GST
