“The New Photography’, is an exhibition and book of New Zealand’s photographer pioneers of the 1960s and 1970s.
Gary Baigent (b. 1941)
Gary Baigent was born in Wakefield, Nelson, in 1941. He majored in painting at the Canterbury University School of Fine Arts at Ham, Christchurch, from 1960 to 1962. He then went north to study at Auckland Teachers’ Training College in 1963. But rather than teach after graduation he opted for a succession of jobs in timber yards, on the railways and wharves, and in woolstores and paper stores. At the same time he worked on The Unseen City, a book on Auckland’s urban life published in September 1967 that stands as a watershed moment in contemporary New Zealand photography.
In 1973 Baigent was chosen by John B Turner for the high-profile Auckland City Art Gallery exhibition Three New Zealand Photographers: Gary Baigent, Richard Collins, John Fields that was accompanied by a widely seen catalogue. Always an independent, though, Baigent earned some notoriety a few years later by writing a blistering attack on Turner and the photographers whose work he and Tom Hutchins had selected for the Auckland gallery’s fledgling photography collection.
Gary Baigent has worked as a trainee camera operator for television, a gardener at the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, a farm worker, a landscape gardener, a commercial diver, a freelance yachting journalist and an assistant editor at SeaSpray magazine.
From Athol McCredie (Ed.), The New Photography, Te Papa Press, Wellington, New Zealand, 2019.
The Exhibition:
The New Photography – Life in the 60s and 70s.
until October 13.
Te Papa Tongarewa The Museum of New Zealand Toi Art Level 4
55 Cable Street
Wellington, New Zealand
https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/visit/exhibitions/toi-art/new-photography-life-60s-and-70s
The book accompanies the exhibition :
The New Photography, Te Papa Press. Publication date: June 2019. Hardback 22x27cm, 216 pages ISBN: 978-0-9951031-9-1. RRP $NZ70.00.
Buy the book here : https://www.tepapastore.co.nz/collections/te-papa-press/products/the-new-photography-new-zealand-s-first-generation-contemporary-photographers
