Gary Baigent, interviewed by curator Athol McCredie, 2012

‘Photography’s got to be right. No impact, no life to me.’

– Gary Baigent

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Transcript: Gary Baigent, interviewed by curator Athol McCredie, 2012

Athol McCredie: So when did the idea for Unseen City develop in your mind?

GB: I was working on the wharf, and I shot a lot of stuff down on the waterfront. And then all the people I was sort of flatting with and living with, I was shooting stuff with them.
And then I met Brian Roach, and Peter Tait. And Brian Roach was fascinated with film. Bad man, terrible man, got me into trouble. He was older than me. Five or six, seven years. No, probably 10 – yeah, probably 10 years older! Anyway, he was always raving on about photography and filming and the French New Wave, and he knew all the directors. He inspired me quite a bit. And so he said, ‘Well, we can make a killing making photographs of Auckland. It’s all there, you just go out and get it.’
But I’d already started doing it anyway, and he came along. But in the end, it was hopeless. He was wanting to play the part of a director, and I’m not like that. I’m my own man really. But there are one or two shots I took with him walking around the city that weren’t bad, but most of them were crap.
Photography’s got to be right. You know all about this. You just can’t shoot because that’s a subject, that’s just not good enough. No impact, no life to me. Anyway, after that I went to Paul’s, and they were excited by it.

AM: So were they the only publisher that you approached?

GB: Yeah. Let me think ... No, it was Paul’s. Blackwood and Janet Paul. They were the only ones. They’d never seen anything quite like it, so we went ahead.

AM: Did Paul’s try to influence you in any way? You’d brought in photos. It wasn’t a complete book at that stage, is that right?

GB: It was semi-complete, I don’t know, maybe 70 percent. I sort of knew what I wanted to get, and I knew where there were gaps. And I said, ‘I’ll have to go and get some.’ And I filled those gaps. I used to go around doing that. But basically, I’d say 70 percent when I first took it in.

AM: So they didn’t say, ‘Oh, we need this and this and this’?

GB: No, they didn’t.

AM: And when you brought the whole lot in eventually, had you laid it out yourself or did they do that?

GB: I laid it out. It wasn’t chronological. It was sort of subject and introduction sort of thing. And then they went through it with me, and there was quite a lot of changing. That’s hard work actually, compiling the images, getting them right. So there were quite a few changes.

AM: Was that just simply in the arrangement?

GB: Yes, just the order.

AM: So photos didn’t go out or come back in or anything? Or maybe just a few?

GB: I don’t think there was a lot of changes. We used what was there. And looking back after a few years, I look back and I think, ‘Oh, that shouldn’t have gone in, and that’s terrible.’ But there are some good ones in there.

AM: So they changed the title?

GB: I wanted to call it Eyes in the City. They thought this was better. And they changed the cover. I had a different cover.

AM: So which image was that?

GB: It was one taken from the back seat of the car …

AM: Looking through the windscreen?

GB: That’s right, but they said this was an icon image, the pigeon.

AM: Well, the story goes that that was chosen because of Don Binney’s popularity at the time.

GB: Could be too, yeah, definitely. I’m sure.

AM: But you haven’t heard that yourself?

GB: I’d never heard that, no. But this was in the air, artwork that was around at that time. 
Well, it’s not a native bird; it’s a pigeon, feral pigeon. I think it’s the railway yard in the gulf.

AM: It’s a kind of good counterpoint to Binney’s, isn’t it? Because he’s doing the natural landscape with native birds, and here you’ve got a city bird.
So the reviews are kind of mixed. The media reviews were positive, but the photographic reviewers were negative. John Turner showed me one he wrote, which was never published, but he says he sent it to you. Do you remember that?

GB: Yeah, I’m trying to remember what he wrote. Of course, he took it from a photographic-print-quality viewpoint. My sort of approach was like a comic-type layout. I just wanted the subject matter to work, but he wanted higher-quality printing, of course. When I say comic, I mean like film.

AM: So a sequence?

GB: Like [John] Cassavetes and [Jean-Luc] Godard. Film had a big influence on me. I was treating a book like making a film, I thought.

AM: I think one of John Turner’s criticisms, suggestions, was that you’d been looking at work in reproduction, therefore prints that you made were like reproductions.

GB: That’s right, that’s right. That’s fair enough. Max Oettli had a go at me too, the little shit! Because he was doing work then, or just getting into it. Because I’m a couple of years older than him.

AM: What’s ironic is that really Max is in the same situation. And John Turner I think and John Fields took him aside and said, ‘Look, good photos but the printing’s crap.’

GB: John Fields was very upset with me. We were drinking in the Kiwi, and he was very serious about photography, and I wasn’t. I was just having fun really. And he was quite angry, but he became a close friend actually, very quickly. And he was a mate with Simon Buis, and Simon and I got on well actually. We were honest with each other, used to abuse each other.

AM: John Fields was angry that you weren’t serious?

GB: Doing high-quality printing and not treating it like religion and so on, you know. Yeah, my motivation was fun, I was just enjoying myself, because I always thought that sort of work always produces the best stuff in my opinion. Serious work is too stilted and too dull for me. I’d rather take a chance and push the edges of things. Sometimes you get it right, but mostly you don’t. And it’s crap. But you tried it. So you learn.

This excerpt is from a conversation for the book, The New Photography. Purchase this book from the Te Papa Store