John Daley, interviewed by curator Athol McCredie, 2011

‘You can’t go up and say, “Oh, you are looking great, can you do that again so I can photograph it?”’

– John Daley

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Transcript
Athol McCredie: You saw Gary Baigent’s The Unseen City book in 1967, and this prompted you to do something similar yourself. But what was the underlying reason that made you want to take street photographs?

John Daley: The rationale in many ways … I was actually extremely, I was really quite shy. I was an only child of elderly parents, and I really didn’t know very well how to relate to people, and people were a curiosity to me. This was really my way of observing the world and trying to work out how things ticked. I might have the gift of the gab now, but I didn’t in those days, and I really didn’t know how to deal comfortably with people at all.

So a lot of what I was doing was observing these kind of strange rites and rituals of city folk and how they went about their lives every day, and I found it absolutely fascinating.
And of course with photography, the sort of photography we were doing, you can’t go up and say, ‘Oh, look, you’re looking great – can you do that again so I can photograph it?’ You really do have to grab the moment and photograph it when it’s happening. And the bulk of the people, certainly for the first couple of years, never knew they were photographed at all.

AM: There must have been times, though, when they did become aware ...

JD: Yes, there were, and I’d sort of go over and say, ‘I hope you don’t mind, this is what I’m doing.’ People were much easier in those days. I mean, God, I’d get my head chopped off now if I did some of the things I did in those days. I only ever got confronted once. That was shooting in a pub, which I probably shouldn’t have tried doing. But people were generally quite good about it.

But the bulk of the shots, people didn’t know they were photographed. Or they may have thought they were photographed, but I’d devised these techniques of judging how far someone was and standing facing a totally different direction, measuring out my focus and things, and then just swinging around, taking the shot, and carrying on, always looking in a different direction, and avoiding the gaze. Sounds rather sort of cowardly, but it was my way of doing it!

AM: In some of those photographs, like the one with the Salvation Army woman and the man [Willis Street, Wellington, 1969] …

JD: I don’t think they were aware of being photographed. He certainly wasn’t.

AM: No, but it seems remarkably close and intimate. You know, you’re right in there.

JD: I was close. I had a Pentax Spotmatic with a 1.4 lens at this stage. And this was pretty radical. And I was pushing my chemistry like anything and actually getting really good results, as you can if you really treat the film kindly and get your temperatures exactly right and do all those things properly. It was a bit of my chemistry background I suppose that helped with that.
So I was shooting a lot of that street stuff – it was all hand-held, I never had tripods – at 6,400 ISO on Tri-X and getting remarkably good results with it. It was much higher than people generally rated film. But it allowed me to do stuff on the streets like that, and I could hold the cameras very steady. So a shot like that outside a pub just by streetlight and at 50mm 1.4 lens was quite possible. They were very involved in what they were doing.

And the sign, ‘Whisky Is an Education’, behind them … I had this fascination with words and signs and signage, and that developed as I started seeing all these images with words behind.

AM: So what were you looking for in these photographs?

JD: Really just a cross-section of a city community going about their life. It was very much a documentary. I wasn’t trying to create great art or anything like that; I was really just trying to document what was happening. I don’t think it was more than that. I was trying to get quirky photos. I like to see people doing interesting and unusual things. I wasn’t interested in shots that were in any way ordinary; there had to be something happening there, whether it was signage, whether it was the way people were relating to each other, body language.

AM: I’m just trying to get into what you thought you were really about. It was this documentary of this cross-section of the community, and yet you weren’t really actively pursuing – you weren’t, like, making a list of different types of sections of the community that you wanted to photograph in a systematic ...

JD: Not at all. It was totally random. Typically, we worked from 8 to 4.30 at Chemistry Division. And on a Friday night, sometimes I’d go in, in summer I might go in after work. Typically, on a Friday night I’d catch the train into the city from Lower Hutt, and I’d just shoot until all hours of the morning, until there’s nobody on the streets. I’d wander.

And in those days, I can remember wandering in backstage at the SEATO [Southeast Asia Treaty Organization] Conference. There was probably all manner of incredibly important people there. Security didn’t seem to be a big deal. Nobody stopped you in those days. It was so much easier. You wouldn’t get near them now.

AM: Was film ever an influence? Because there are a number of films which have been done on cities.

JD: No. I can remember going three times to see Blow-up, you know, the Antonioni film. I think I’ve still got a tape of it somewhere tucked away. But that was kind of almost a romantic thing, you know, of these nubile young ladies running around your studio, and the convertible Rolls-Royce, your nice Nikons, which I was most interested in. So, you know, that was a kind of fascination.

I have this theory that photography became respectable about then. One of the major influences, ironically, was Tony Armstrong-Jones marrying Princess Margaret. I think people suddenly thought, ‘Oh well, he’s a photographer; it must be socially acceptable.’ There was certainly a period around there when photography as a career, and photography itself, was suddenly more acceptable than it used to be. That was very much a 60s thing. It was a time of great change in photography.
 
AM: Let’s just talk about the photographs a bit more too, because I mentioned earlier they’re quite different from Gary Baigent’s, which are much looser and rougher, and yours are so much more – I don’t know if refined is the word – but more controlled.

JD: Well, I suppose I was a professional photographer, I was being trained. I was young at that stage, but I was being trained in quality photography and quality control in photography. I expected full tonal range, and good blacks, and good highlights, and good detail, and sharpness, you know. If it didn’t have those things, it went in the bin. So there was a lot more precision about it I suppose, and that’s not in any way knocking what Gary’s done. That was my background.

Sometimes I wished I could loosen up more. I think I was aware that this stuff was a bit more precise than I would like it to have been. I sort of would have liked to have been looser, and possibly later I became so really. But I was working of course in a scientific environment too, and everything we did had to be absolutely precise, whether it was medical photography or metallurgical, forensic stuff we did at Chemistry Division. It was all about precision, and measurement and light quality and all those sort of factors, and so that sort of rubs off on you.
Film was expensive too, and I wasn’t earning very much. I was fairly mean. You won’t find more than a frame or two on any shots in there on any of the proof sheets. I was pretty lean on how much I shot.

I got to a stage of visualising things even when I didn’t have a camera with me. I’d see everything through the camera frame: click, click, click. It even sometimes had the little exposure needle thing on the side of it. I’d be looking around in a series of clicks, I spent so much time ... I’d walk out from under a shop veranda, and I’d just reach down with my hand and close the lens down bit because the light was brighter, come off the other side of the road under the veranda, and put my hand down and open up the stops again. You became so adept at that. You always seemed to get a pretty bang-on exposure. The camera literally became part of your body.

AM: So after all the work you did in the 60s and 70s, a book didn’t happen, or at least not until you published in 2006 Big Smoke, is that right?

JD: No, it didn’t, and I just put it away. I’d gone through various processes earlier on in Wellington before I went to Sarawak. It ended up with Reed Publishing, AH and AW Reed. And we went and had a big meeting in there, but they said, ‘No, it’s not in colour and it’s not sort of beautiful New Zealand, so it’s not really us.’ When I got up to Auckland, I went and saw a literary agent who is quite well known, he’s an ex-Reed’s man, but they never managed it. There’s one or two people who are always interested in these things, but they never quite happen.

I think it was the best thing out that it waited the 30 or 40 years for it to mature. Because that’s put a whole different aspect on it. It became a sort of historical document I suppose.

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