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Overview
Oblique view into a fish and chip shop showing a man and woman at the counter. The words "Steve's fish & chip shop" appear on the window. A dog stands in the doorway. At the right a mirror in the doorway shows a back view of the man, and a sign beside it reads "Fried Oysters to take away".
This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025) on page 279.
It is easy to imagine the camera as an invisible, all-seeing eye. But the reality of an image like this is that it was taken by a young man, John Daley, who had practised over and again how to be unobtrusive. The reason for doing so, he said, was to ‘create a cross-section of a city community going about their life’: I wasn’t trying to create great art or anything like that. I was just trying to document what was happening . . . Really the rationale in many ways was that I was quite shy. I was an only child of elderly parents and I really didn’t know very well how to relate to people. People were a curiosity to me. Photographing was my way of observing the world and working out how things ticked . . .And of course, with the sort of photography I was doing, you can’t go up and say, ‘Oh, you are looking great, can you do that again so I can photograph it?’ You have to grab the moment and photograph it when it’s happening. And the bulk of the people . . .never knew they were being photographed at all.1
1 Athol McCredie, The New Photography: New Zealand’s first-generation contemporary photographers, Te Papa Press, Wellington, 2019, pp.133–34.