Overview
Richard Collins is a New Zealand photographer who has been working in a personal mode since the 1960s.
Beginnings
Collins was born in Wellington in 1941. He was educated at Christ’s College in Christchurch and from 1961 to 1964 studied architecture at the University of Auckland, where he gained a Diploma of Architecture. While a student he met photographer Gary Baigent, who later taught him the basics of photography and whose spontaneous 35mm approach was influential.
Practice and Influences
From 1967 to 1973 Collins practised architecture with JASMaD architects. In 1974 he moved with his wife and daughter to Pākiri, north of Auckland, to become part owner of a block of farmland. Here he built a house in which he still lives and planted a small vineyard and an olive orchard. Many of his photographs have been taken at Pākiri:
…things that caught my eye or interested me, like the shape of a dune, or the native vegetation, often in images which don’t seem to have any obvious centre of attention, though this wasn’t something I consciously pursued. And people, intimates I guess, friends. Ones who would put up with me taking their photograph.
Collins’ work has a gentle, poetic quality to it that reflects the images of those European photographers he lists as some of his influences: Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész and Jacques Henri Lartigue. He has generally used the 35mm film format, but worked with a large-format 4 x 5 inch camera for a short time after being impressed by the tonal quality of Edward Weston and Paul Strand works he was shown in 1969 by photographic enthusiast John B Turner.
Exhibitions and Publications
Richard Collins’ work was seen in the first compilation of contemporary New Zealand photography, the 1970 booklet Photography: A visual dialect; 10 contemporary NZ photographers, and appeared in issues of New Zealand Photography magazine in the early 1970s. His major exposure came in the 1973 Auckland City Art Gallery exhibition and publication, Three New Zealand Photographers: Gary Baigent, Richard Collins, John Fields. In 1976 and 1981 he had solo exhibitions at the Auckland photographers’ gallery Snaps. A one-person exhibition at McNamara Gallery, Whanganui in 2006 was accompanied by a catalogue and surveyed his work from 1962 to 1997.
Philosophy
As suggested in his statement above, Collins has always seen photography as part of his life but never his exclusive focus:
I don’t know that I ever thought of myself as a photographer, more as someone who takes photographs. I think you experiment, don’t you? People try photography to see how it will go, and then they drop by the wayside. I decided to stick with painting, drawing and photography, and I’m always aware of them but they have to fit in with other things that I’m doing. Then of course there’s always that moment when you know you should be carrying the camera around with you all the time, but I just think, ‘Where’s the camera? There’s something going on here. I’d like to see what I can make of it’ – rather than being a professional doing it 24 hours a day. Sometimes people say, ‘What’s your hobby?’ and my hackles start to rise, so I guess, basically, it’s a passion. And when a good image appears it’s sort of like a gift, really.
– Quotations and other information from The New Photography: New Zealand’s first-generation contemporary photographers (Te Papa Press, 2019)