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Overview
This black and white portrait of the artist Theo Schoon was taken by Steve Rumsey in 1952, the year they met at the Mt Albert Plant Research Station in Auckland. Rumsey was employed as a scientific photographer, documenting plant diseases and insects studied by the institution, while Schoon was working on the farm staff. In the photograph, taken at the Mt Albert Plant Research Station, Schoon's face stares straight towards the camera. His body tilts to the right of the image and his left leg is hitched over the arm of the wooden chair on which he sits. The light floods the image from the right, dividing Schoon's face in two, although in printing the negative without huge contrasts in light and dark, Rumsey has downplayed the potential for drama. (The contrast is given greater emphasis in another print of this negative, also in the Te Papa collection, in which Schoon's face and upper body are cropped and the contrasts are heightened.)
First contact
Rumsey met Schoon in 1952, the year Schoon moved to Auckland after spending time in Rotorua creating an extraordinary archive of modernist photographs of the geothermal activity that the area is famous for. Becoming friends, Rumsey started printing proofs of Schoon's photographs of South Island rock drawings and the geothermal region for an exhibition of Schoon's work at the Auckland City Art Gallery under the auspices of gallery Director Eric Westbrook. While this exhibition never happened, Rumsey became conscious of Schoon's talents as a photographer and the important work he had created since coming to New Zealand in 1939. Rumsey remained friends with Schoon until his death in 1985. Schoon appears again in Te Papa's collection of Rumsey's negatives, although this image is the first time Rumsey had photographed him.
Portrait of the artist
The Theo Schoon image is fairly typical of one approach Rumsey used when photographing artists. While many artist portraits locate the artist among their works, or in the studio -sometimes in the process of working - this image bears close resemblance to Rumsey's portrait of printmaker Kees Hos, also in the Te Papa collection. Both artists turn their heads to stare directly and neutrally at the camera, their bodies angled away from the lens. Their faces are sharply resolved, but both backgrounds are out of focus, creating patterns of light and dark that echo the visual rhythms of the subject's clothing.