Overview
John Daley was a New Zealand photographer working from the 1960s to the early 2010s. He produced a body of street photographs in Wellington and Auckland in the 1960s and 70s.
Early Experience
John Daley was born in 1946 in Cromwell, Central Otago. He began photographing and processing his own work as a teenager and gained professional experience in photography at Auckland Hospital during school vacations. When he left school in 1964 he worked as a photographer for five years in the Chemistry Division of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) in Lower Hutt. This gave him a high level of technical grounding in photographic technique.
Personal Photography in Wellington
In early 1968 Daley began taking candid photographs on the streets of Wellington. His motivation 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. I don’t think it was more than that. I was trying to get quirky photos. I liked to see people doing interesting and unusual things.
More than this,
…the rationale in many ways was that I was quite shy. I was an only child of elderly parents and I 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. So a lot of what I was doing was observing these strange rites and rituals of city folk and how they went about their lives every day.
Working in Auckland
During his holidays in the late 1960s Daley would travel to Auckland to meet other photographers and photograph there. His ultimate aim was to publish a book of his Auckland and Wellington city photographs but he was unable to find a publisher. In 1969 he left the DSIR for a posting in Sarawak with Volunteer Service Abroad (VSA). When he returned to New Zealand in 1972 he got a job as a medical photographer at Auckland Hospital and picked up his street photography again.
Daley was included in the 1970 Photography: A visual dialect booklet and in The Active Eye exhibition and catalogue of 1975 that surveyed contemporary New Zealand photography, but he did not otherwise exhibit or publish his personal work in the 1960s or 70s.
Later work
Between 1975 and 1977 Daley was photographer at Auckland City Art Gallery. He then set out as a commercial photographer in advertising and corporate work as well as photographing for a number of books, including Craft New Zealand (1978), Bone Stone Shell, Tivaevae: Portraits of Cook Islands quilting (1992) and his own unpublished book on famous New Zealanders.
Big Smoke
In 2004 Daley produced Big Smoke, a book of his documentary photographs from the 1960s and 70s. The work was also shown as an exhibition at McNamara Gallery, Whanganui and toured to both Pātaka Museum of Arts and Culture, Porirua and Auckland Central City Library. He reflected on the late realisation of his early work:
Now I think it was best that Big Smoke waited the thirty years to mature. Because that has put a whole different aspect on it. Recording things for posterity didn’t interest me in the same way as the immediate, but it became a sort of historical document.
John Daley died in Auckland in 2012.
– Quotations and other information from The New Photography: New Zealand’s first-generation contemporary photographers (Te Papa Press, 2019)