Burnt Corsican pine (Pinus laricio), Balmoral Forest, Canterbury, 1955

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Prior to the 1980s, many New Zealand government departments employed staff photographers or operated photographic libraries, effectively creating and maintaining for the nation a portrait of the physical nature of the country. Images included geology and topography, flora and fauna, agriculture, and public works enterprises such as hydroelectric dams, as well as scenic landscapes. As sole photographer with the New Zealand Forest Service from 1951 to 1984, John Johns made a significant contribution to this official image bank.

In the early 1950s New Zealand’s extensive pre-war plantings of pine had developed into a huge but only partially quantified resource. It was also becoming evident to the Forest Service that indigenous forests needed to be better managed both for timber and for soil and water conservation. Aerial photography was one way to graphically and economically survey both types of forest. Publicity photographs were needed as well to promote sustainable forest management principles, and especially to gain the ongoing support of government.
Johns was proficient in both areas, but he was also a perfectionist, and despite minimal budgets (he had to build his own darkroom at home), government employment as a photographer offered relative freedom to hone his techniques.

It also gave him numerous opportunities to grapple with the problem of how to make satisfying pictures out of the visual chaos presented by trees and vegetation — though the geometry and patterns offered by plantation conifer forests must have been a gift for someone with an interest in precision and form like Johns.

Johns’ expressed personal agenda was conservation. A forester by training, he was appalled by the clear-felling of native forests on the West Coast in the 1950s, saying that he ‘couldn’t understand how civilised people could commit such a barbaric crime’.1 His response was a long list of books promoting conservation, from Westland’s wealth in 1959 to Tomorrow’s trees in 1992. But perhaps because his images were published as illustrations to texts, and became so ubiquitous, their value as fine photographs in their own right only became appreciated late in Johns’ career.

Athol McCredie

1 Cited in Kennedy Warne, ‘John Johns: Vision of the forest’, New Zealand Geographic, no. 22, April/June 1994, p. 46.