Max Oettli, interviewed by curator Athol McCredie, 2019

‘I tend to hop around like a rabbit rather than graze like an old cow.’

– Max Oettli

Transcript
Athol McCredie: So, Max, in the ’60s, you know, landscape photography was really big. You had Brian Brake, you had Ken and Jean Bigwood doing things – and this became a whole genre of photography really of the attractive, beautiful, New Zealand book. But you were off taking photographs in the streets and of people. So why did you do that rather than photograph landscapes like it seemed everyone else was?

Max Oettli: The short answer is, I don’t do landscapes, which is slightly ironic, slightly facetious. I contradict myself because I actually noticed there’s a surprising number of landscapes in my work, but I’ve never actually exhibited them or published them. I don’t think photography is adequate as a means to – well, my photography is adequate – as a means to express the depth and beauty of landscape.

AM: So, it's more adequate to express social relations, is that what you’re saying?

MO: Yes, that’s what I’m saying.

AM: In what way?

MO: In the way that everybody from Baudelaire on more or less said, you know, you’re a flâneur, you’re out there, you’re walking, you’re picking up the texture of the city. That’s something, you know, that’s Gary [Baigent], that’s what I did and various others did – and it is inexhaustible. You know, even a small town can give you a lot of stuff occasionally. The city is more animated and there’s more going on. And you’re looking, I suppose, for a version of the exotic. Although, if I see something too exotic I turn away. But I was a lot more naive when I was 19, 20, 21, whatever I was, and I simply looked at and was fascinated by everything.

AM: Would you have called it documentary photography at that time? Do you call it documentary today?

MO: No, probably not. I think of documentary photography as more thorough and more targeted. I have done documentary.

AM: So documentary tends to be, like photojournalism, telling a story using a whole variety of photographs which adds up to something. So you’re doing more: a one of this, a one of that?

MO: I’m much more spontaneous, yes, I think I would say. I tend to hop around like a rabbit, rather than graze like an old cow.

AM: But do you think, looking back on your photographs in that period, that they’d be called documentary today?

MO: Of course. The documentary component, which is one of the many components today to have, has become stronger as time goes on. I’ve got photographs, endless photographs of old jalopies, cars of all kinds. Very often with people’s bums sticking out of the bonnet. You no longer see this. So that’s, if you like, documentary. I told my students many years ago that every time you press a shutter button you’re essentially taking act of [recording] a historical situation.

AM: A whole bunch of you started taking a similar style of photograph in the 1960s, and Gary Baigent’s The Unseen City sort of lifted the lid on that. So to what extent were you influencing each other, talking to each other?

MO: Ah, the Wild Bunch! Very variable from person to person. I knew of some of the others, especially after the arrival of John B Turner when things were a bit more formalised, and then obviously Photo-Forum after that. But in the ’60s, we’re talking about ’66 to ’70 say, I was aware of them. I myself often regretted that I made a bad review of Gary’s book and got to know him a little. The others sort of drifted in. But at the time, no, I think that I felt that I was doing what I wanted to do.

My influences, such as they were, would have come from overseas. The likes of [André] Kertész and [Henri Cartier-] Bresson and others. Walker Evans. I was very aware of the great tradition of photography. I spent a lot of time in the Hamilton Public Library looking at their very good collection of books when I was a kid, you know, 17 or 18.

AM: I was very interested in one of your earliest photographs, which I’ve used in the exhibition and book, taken from a motorbike.

MO: Oh, yes. That’s right.

AM: It was taken in ’66. Are you actually riding the bike in the photograph? 

MO: Yes. Yes, I was. Crazy bastard. That’s my take on a Waikato landscape. It’s not far from our family farm.

AM: What interests me is that that is so early in terms of an emergence of a movement in New Zealand, so you wouldn’t have been aware of the other photographers at that stage. And I just wonder where this photograph is coming from. So, I guess you’re saying that it’s coming from Cartier-Bresson and other photographers you looked at?

MO: And, I think, a kind of a boyish love of experimentation – you know, what happens if I set the self-timer on my old twin lens reflex and burn up this gravel highway, gravel road, you know. I think I took about four or five of those. And I was impressed with them right from the start. There were things happening with perspective, with the gravel flying up and so on, which I thought was very interesting. I don’t know how visible they are.
And I like my old single banger motorbike. It was fun, you know. It’s one of the reasons why I limp.

AM: Tell me about a couple of influences that a number of photographers mention which were seen in Auckland round about 1967. One is The Photographer’s Eye exhibition from the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

MO: Absolutely. I actually took the trouble or found the money somewhere to buy the catalogue, because I wanted to look at them again.

I was very interested in the didactic element in what [curator John] Szarkowski was telling us. He was giving us categories of photography: the real, the over-real – one category of reality, one of reality at one remove. He was talking about point of view. He was talking about perspective, the flat and the deep. And I actually used Szarkowski’s distinctions in my photography courses for quite a long time. They seemed to work as a way of learning to speak the language of photography.

And of course it obviously was also an enormous privilege to see prints by the likes of Ansel Adams and Eugene Smith and others, you know – quite different approaches to printing and different approaches to photography. Robert Frank, whom I was beginning to get interested in as well. Certainly I spent a lot of time at that show. It was a privilege having something of that quality around.

AM: Let’s talk about the film Blow-up, which was produced in ’66 and seen in New Zealand in 1967. This is by Michelangelo Antonioni. It uses the Swinging Sixties London as its setting, and it focuses around a fashion photographer. Tell me about your response to that.

MO: Well, obviously, I already knew about Antonioni because of a cinema in Auckland called the Lido, which brought us a lot of really good films. I’d seen La Notte. I’d seen various others. I knew he was someone with a very pure visual imagination. And when word got around that he had a film about a photographer which is loosely based on David Bailey and that there were bits of certain ladies which one did not often see in the cinema – I blush to say this – I obviously went off to see it.

I never worked in the style that the David Hemmings figure works in. The gritty, grainy stuff wasn’t bigly my scene. I didn’t want to go out of my way to find human misery; there was enough of it more subtly available in the streets. We didn’t have people sleeping in the streets in those days. We were more or less a socialist regime still. But I looked at it. I found it fascinating. I found the idea of the image hidden in the grain fascinating.

AM: Tell me about the cameras and the techniques you are using. So you were using 35 millimetre film?

MO: Cameras, yes, 35 mil. I instinctively headed for open viewfinder cameras. I felt reflexes were just a bit … Initially, I didn’t even know exactly how they functioned. You know, I had to actually see one with the mirror flicking up and down – there is a mirror – because I had a fixed mirror on my roll-film camera obviously, and I thought there must be some way of flipping it out of the way.

And the rangefinder cameras were just quieter. They were more direct. You know, you had a direct three-dimensional view of what you were photographing. A screen, a focusing screen, tends to compress things into two dimensions, which is interesting in its own way, but it’s not what I was looking for, and with a rangefinder, a well-adjusted rangefinder, you could very quickly find a point of focus.

Initially – and the other reason, very important reason at the time – was that you could pick up second-hand viewfinder cameras more easily than reflexes. Reflexes tended to be a bit pricier.

AM: These were Japanese?

MO: These were Japanese clones of Leica 3c and 3f models with the little viewfinders and of the Zeiss Contaxes, which are a very sophisticated, quite complex camera, which Nikon copied almost component for component initially.

AM: So, the activity of photographers such as yourself at that time seems a very solitary kind of activity. And you’ve said to me previously that there’s a sense of distance and longing involved in photography, a distance from your experience using the camera or something about photography. Can you explain this a bit more?

MO: I can elaborate on it in various ways. One of them would be the idea that you’ve got a machine between yourself and reality. You’ve got this picture-making machine, which, no matter how small it is, is there, you know. And it does immediately put you into the position of the voyeur, of him who watches.

I’ve talked at some length also about my identification with, and unease at, my adopted country. I love New Zealand but New Zealand often made me sad. We were fighting a war in Vietnam – there’s all kinds of weird stuff going on. There was a very aggressive and important generation gap in those days, which I think we’ve lost to some extent. People have just become cooler all round, you know. But that was something you were very aware of.

And again, very few of my photographs I think head down the path towards denigrating people. If I saw them in awkward situations or awkward ways, it tended to be with a kind of sorrow I suppose, but not even sorrow, a kind of – I was detached. I saw there was something that was important to document at some level. But I don’t think I can go much further than that.

And also the fact that I’m wandering about with a slightly funny foreign accent. That I was a little bit ... I was always a bit on the margin – and that’s not a bad thing; I think that's positive ultimately – which did give me maybe a view of things which it would not occur to New Zealanders to photograph.

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