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This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
Eric Lee-Johnson kept his photographic practice quiet lest ‘this somewhat despised field’, as he put it, undermine his established reputation as a painter of neo-romantic images of the New Zealand countryside. This allowed him to be experimental, internationalist and abstract in the medium of the camera — indeed, more so than in his painting. The images that resulted from his ‘star trails’ and infra-red experiments, made while living in the remote Waimamaku Valley in Northland, show the early influences of surrealism and Bauhaus design, which he had encountered while working as a commercial designer and typographer in London during the 1930s. In these photographs the sky is imbued with a sense of the magical and the elemental. The images represent the potential for the occurrence of mysterious phenomena, while technological and military undertones combined with black and white photography lend them a quasi-scientific truthfulness.
Many of Lee-Johnson’s photographs from this period display a fascination with events occurring in the sky, and are concerned with the social and political context of the Cold War era and the development of space research and satellite technology. In October 1957 the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite into space — Sputnik I, which Lee-Johnson photographed for news publications. In Reconnaissance of Terra, Waimamakau, Northland, a sense of wonder is underpinned by uncertainty about whether the shapes in the sky are natural phenomena or man-made machines. This photograph — a composite of three different images, including those ‘drawn’ by Lee-Johnson with a torch at night — brings together the natural and the artificial, and portrays them as compelling parts of the same cultural universe.
Lissa Mitchell
This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025) on page 330.
Artist and photographer Eric Lee-Johnson began photographing the night sky at his Northland home of Waimamaku in 1956, using long exposures to capture star trails. In this image, he devised his own trails, instructing his son Peter to rotate two torches simultaneously at night while he held the camera shutter open. He also photographed their house at night and then sandwich-printed the negatives, adding in several images of the moon for good measure. In the same year, Lee-Johnson photographed the track of the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, the Soviet Sputnik I. In this Cold War era, there were political tensions over aerial spying by high-altitude aircraft. Although Sputnik did little more than emit radio beeps as it orbited the Earth, its ability to fly over any part of the Earth with impunity made it clear that a new era of surveillance from above would follow. Perhaps this is the meaning behind Lee-Johnson’s title Reconnaissance of terra.