Reconnaissance of Terra, Waimamakau, Northland

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