Overview
John Fields was an American-born photographer who worked in New Zealand from 1966 to 1976. He was a significant figure in the emerging field of contemporary New Zealand photography of this period.
Beginnings
John Fields was born in 1938 in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and was educated in Rockport, a New England artists’ colony. He learned to photograph while in the US Navy and became a commercial photographer in the early 1960s before working as a specialist in electron microscope imaging at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He emigrated to New Zealand in 1966 to continue working in this sphere at the University of Auckland.
Auckland
Fields brought a new level of technical expertise and professionalism to the emerging contemporary photography scene in Auckland in the late 1960s. He also brought an expectation that photography be better recognised within the arts in his adopted country. To this end he organised a cooperatively published booklet in 1970 of the work of ten contemporary photographers, Photography: A visual dialect – the first such publication in New Zealand. He was also responsible for one of the first exhibitions of contemporary photography at a dealer gallery: a group exhibition at Barry Lett Galleries in 1972.
Fields’ Work
Fields was equally proficient across a variety of photographic practices. These included candid 35mm shots of people through to large-format, tripod-based photographs of buildings and places. All were taken with a precision that reflected Fields’ highly technical background. Documenting things – people, events, objects, interiors, buildings – became his particular passion.
Influences
When Fields discovered Walker Evans and his 1938 book American Photographs, it was both a confirmation of Fields’existing thinking and a stimulus to further work, for Evans showed how the photography of objects and built environments could speak of people and culture:
Honestly, that was an absolute revelation for me, the treatment and the relevance of photography in society and what it reflected, and what is at issue. And the evidence beyond the evidence, as it were. And I went straight into a series I had wanted to do called ‘Signatures’. That was on the homes of artist friends and others. They just let me wander in their house and I would look for the relevant visuals that would identify their signature.
Publications
Fields was commissioned to photograph for the 1973 book Victorian Auckland: Photographs of the earlier buildings of Auckland, co-authored with John Stacpoole; and his work gained further prominence via the 1973 Auckland City Art Gallery exhibition and publication Three New Zealand Photographers: Gary Baigent, Richard Collins, John Fields.
The Thames Project
Victorian Auckland led to the NZ Historic Places Trust hiring Fields to photograph its listed buildings in the Coromandel town of Thames. Captivated by the history of this nineteenth-century mining town, Fields embarked on an ambitious plan to more thoroughly document Thames. However, a disagreement with the Inland Revenue Department in 1976 over the professional status of his work prompted him to permanently leave New Zealand for Australia in protest. The work was eventually published posthumously in 2017 as John Fields: Thames and Townspeople 1973–76 (Galerie Langman).
Australia
Fields initially taught photography in Sydney before being appointed chief photographer at the Australian Museum in Sydney. In 1987 he became head photographer in the Media Resources Unit at the University of New England, Armidale, NSW, and he was later liaison officer in the Publicity Unit.
John Fields died in 2013.
– Quotations and other information from The New Photography: New Zealand’s first-generation contemporary photographers (Te Papa Press, 2019)