Overview
Gary Baigent is a key figure in the emerging moment of contemporary New Zealand photography in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Beginnings
Gary Baigent was born in Wakefield, Nelson, in 1941. He majored in painting at the Canterbury University School of Fine Arts, Christchurch from 1960 to 1962. He then went north to study at Auckland Teachers’ Training College in 1963 where, by his own account, he spent much of his time in the college’s darkroom. But rather than teach after graduation he opted for a succession of jobs in timberyards, on the railways and wharves, and in woolstores and paper stores.
The Unseen City
At the same time, Baigent began working on The Unseen City: 123 photographs of Auckland, a book on Auckland’s urban life published in 1967 that stands as a watershed moment in contemporary New Zealand photography. It was the polar opposite of the conventional photo books that were full of calendar-style picturesque imagery. Baigent’s photographs were contrasty, grainy images shot on the streets, in backyards, in pubs, on the wharves and in student flats. The book was polarising but it also helped stimulate a new style of photography. Baigent later wrote:
Suddenly, in Auckland, everyone was buying cameras and photographing the streets . . . Photography was in and just as suddenly, people I’d never met of heard of, came out of the woodwork to praise, or conversely, to damn me.1
Influences and Approach
Baigent cites the French New Wave cinema he first encountered at art school as a very early influence. This relied on hand-held cameras, available light, improvised screenplay and the use of friends and acquaintances as actors – all things that meshed well with his informal approach to photographing his own milieu:
My motivation was fun and excitement, roaming around taking photographs just because I thought that sort of approach produced the best stuff. Serious work can be too stilted, too dull, too over-thought for me – no blood flow. I’d rather take a chance and push the edges of things. Sometimes you get it right, but mostly you don’t. But you tried it, so you learn.
Working Environment
Gary Baigent’s work was situated within a bohemian environment that developed in New Zealand, especially Auckland, in the 1960s. A boom in material prosperity and levels of education through the 1950s and 60s helped foster a generation of young people who felt less driven than their parents to focus on a career and ‘getting ahead’. Alternative lifestyles were explored. These included practising forms of expression such as jewellery making, pottery, weaving and photography that were not dependent on formal training, nor freighted with tradition.
Profile in the 1970s
In 1973 Baigent was chosen by John B Turner for the high-profile Auckland City Art Gallery exhibition Three New Zealand Photographers: Gary Baigent, Richard Collins, John Fields. This was the first curated exhibition of contemporary photography in New Zealand and its fully illustrated catalogue was widely seen, cementing Baigent’s name as an important local photographer.
Later Career
Gary Baigent has worked as a trainee camera operator for television, a gardener at the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), farm worker, landscape gardener, commercial diver, freelance yachting journalist, and assistant editor at SeaSpray magazine. After the 1970s his photography became more connected with his passion for sailing.
In 2015, Unseen City, a major exhibition showing the 1960s work of Gary Baigent, along with Richard Charters and Robert Ellis, was held at Te Uru, Waitakere City and City Gallery Wellington.
1. Gary Baigent, ‘Hobohemia: Making The Unseen City’, Metro, December 1987, pp. 230–41.
Unsourced quotations and other information from The New Photography: New Zealand’s first-generation contemporary photographers by Athol McCredie (Te Papa Press, 2019)