Max Oettli biography

Max Oettli is a Swiss / New Zealand photographer who works in a personal documentary mode. He is known within New Zealand particularly for his photographs taken in the late 1960s and early 70s in Auckland.

Beginnings

Max Oettli was born in Switzerland in 1947 and migrated to New Zealand with his family in 1956. He was brought up in Hamilton and was a trainee press photographer at the Waikato Times over university vacations from 1966 to 1969. He applied this experience to his work on the student newspaper Craccum while he studied English, history and art history at the University of Auckland.

Career

From 1970 to 1975 Oettli was technical instructor in film and photography at the University of Auckland Elam School of Fine Arts. For some of this time he was also founding president of PhotoForum, a group advocating for and promoting expressive photography. The profile he gained amongst photographers from these positions was reinforced by four solo exhibitions from 1970 to 1975 (one of which was shown in eight public galleries). He was also included in the landmark The Active Eye touring exhibition that surveyed contemporary New Zealand photography.

Oettli left New Zealand with his wife Simone in 1976 to travel extensively. His most substantial quantity of published work up until 2006 was a selection of photographs from those travels reproduced in PhotoForum magazine in 1979.

The couple settled in Geneva, where Oettli worked in architectural and aerial imaging while also teaching photography. In 2007 he came back to New Zealand to take up a position as lecturer in photography at Otago Polytechnic. When the position ended in 2012 he returned to Geneva and semi-retirement.

His Work

Oettli lists Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész, Walker Evans and Lord Snowdon (Anthony Armstrong-Jones) as early influences and it is easy to see the first two in his images taken from wandering the streets, looking for odd juxtapositions, moments of humour and urban poetry. Some of these have an affectionately critical edge that Oettli believes came from being an immigrant and feeling slightly on the margin of New Zealand society.

Oettli does not consider his photography as strictly documentary, for he believes the term refers more to in-depth, serial projects on a given topic. But he also concedes that with the passage of time the historical documentary aspect of his early New Zealand photographs has become stronger: ‘I've got photographs, endless photographs of old jalopies, cars of all kinds. Very often with people's bum sticking out of the bonnet. You no longer see this. So that's, if you like, documentary.’¹

This whole idea of photography and art is something I never engaged with. I just didn’t think that kind of discourse was worth wasting time on. There were contexts for photography and the art context was an interesting one, I felt. It seemed that if photographs weren’t publishable in any journalistic way, the default option was to make them into an art. But I wasn’t going to start crusading about this.²

Max Oettli has never stopped making wry observations of people and places with his camera, though in later years he shifted to using digital cameras and shooting in colour. His evolving exhibition Men was seen from 2000 in Geneva, Switzerland to New Zealand in 2008 and 2017.

Oettli’s early New Zealand work is featured in The New Photography: New Zealand’s first-generation contemporary photographers (Te Papa Press, 2019). His entire collection of New Zealand negatives is held by the National Library of New Zealand.

1. Interview by Athol McCredie with Max Oettli, 9 April 2019, Te Papa.
2. Interview by Athol McCredie.