Overview
Len Wesney was a New Zealand photographer working in the late 1960s to the 1980s. His photographs often have a surreal humour to them.
Beginnings
Len Wesney was born in 1946 in Invercargill and was a member of the Southland Photographic Society as a teenager. He spent a year studying painting at the Canterbury School of Fine Arts. There, he said, ‘My interest in painting virtually ceased but I never regretted my year at art college, for it has taught me to simplify my vision into basic shapes. I failed my history of art examination anyway for a better cause by far.’
Photography was not significantly taught at tertiary level in New Zealand at this time so after working at odd jobs to save enough money he travelled to the United Kingdom to study photography at the Guildford School of Art in 1966 and 1967.
Success in the UK
Wesney held his first solo exhibition at the Qantas Galleries in London in early 1968:
I saw that the space was empty and asked them if I could have a show. I wasn’t really ready for an exhibition. I didn’t have any expectations but I sent invitations to Amateur Photographer, the British Journal of Photography and so on. Everybody came. And it did impress a few people, like Bill Brandt and Brian Seed. But I didn’t even know who Bill Brandt was!1
The exhibition gave Wesney a sudden profile as an emerging talent in the UK. He was included in the Photographers of the Future exhibition at Kodak House in London in 1969, and featured in leading British photographic journals such as Amateur Photographer, Creative Camera, Photography Year Book, the British Journal of Photography Annual, and Single Lens Reflex Photography Yearbook between 1968 and 1970.
Professional Work
After leaving Guildford Wesney freelanced, and was assistant to UK photojournalist and illustrative photographers Brian Seed and Derek Bayes successively. He then returned to New Zealand to work as a photographer with the Christchurch Star from 1970 to 1982. He was employed on the weekend edition from around 1975 and its features gave him more time and freedom than the news-oriented work of the daily edition. Besides taking photographs, he wrote a monthly column for the newspaper during 1975 and 1976 on contemporary photography.
Personal Photography
Wesney produced personal work both in the UK and in New Zealand concurrently with his professional photography. There is a surrealist thread that runs through such work and this might be traced to Bill Brandt. But another source could have been conversations he had with British photographer Tony Ray-Jones. Like Ray-Jones, Wesney seemed to take an affectionate delight in the absurd visual juxtapositions that the camera sometimes imposes in everyday life.
In New Zealand, Wesney’s work was reproduced in Photo-Forum magazine between 1974 and 1977 and in the 1975 touring The Active Eye exhibition catalogue. His only solo exhibition in this country was a retrospective at McNamara Gallery, Whanganui, in 2004.
Len Wesney died in Christchurch in 2017. His negatives, along with a substantial number of black and white prints, are now held by Te Papa.
1. 'Young contemporary: Len Wesney', Creative Camera, no. 44, February 1968, p. 56.
General source: The New Photography: New Zealand’s first-generation contemporary photographers (Te Papa Press, 2019)