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This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025).
The New Zealand painter and photographer Eric Lee-Johnson worked as graphic designer for a leading London advertising agency between 1930 and 1938. This line of work obliged him to be thoroughly au fait with the latest trends in design, architecture, typography, painting and photography. He was particularly influenced by the German Bauhaus movement, writing that his ‘functional, new-look’ designs for press advertisements, packaging and posters had been both noted and reproduced by the sophisticated trade magazines of the era. (1) This photograph is shot from an upper storey of a building on the corner of Brandon and Featherson streets in Wellington’s CBD in which Lee-Johnson worked briefly as a freelance advertising illustrator. Its unusual vantage point, flattened perspective and visual ambiguity of shadows, with more substance than objects and people, are all drawn from the European New Photography playbook. Lee-Johnson took photographs extensively throughout his life. In New Zealand, most are documentary-style images of family, friends and activities in Northland, where he came to settle. Photographs like this one, which reveal his designer background, are much less common.
1. Eric Lee-Johnson, No Road to Follow: Autobiography of a New Zealand artist, Godwit, Auckland, 1994, p.31.