Pakiri 1969

This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025) on page 317.

It seems natural to place the subject in the centre of the photograph. It mimics our vision, with its central focus and a gradually falling away periphery that serves to provide context. But in the 1960s, an emerging generation of New Zealand photographers, including Gary Baigent and Richard Collins, became conscious of how the periphery of the photographic image has a definite edge and is usually as sharp as the centre —unlike the field of the eye. Where previous photographers were subject-focused — and would freely crop prints to the subject — the new generation were more interested in visual relationships within the boundary of the frame and rarely cropped. Their subject was correspondingly more difficult to define. In Gary Baigent’s image, for example, is it the man reading, or the wallpaper? And in this Richard Collins photograph, is it the young woman heading out of the frame, or the distant group of youths on the beach? The answer in each case is both. The nominal subjects are nearly out of frame, but their relationship to what else is in the rectangle is what counts.