John Fields, interviewed by curator Athol McCredie, 2012

‘I was looking at people in isolation ... every chance I got, I would head down Queen Street and watch for things...’

– John Fields

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Transcript

John Fields: Arriving in New Zealand and a total new culture, the impact was enormous. Of course, the motorway construction was starting to get under way in Auckland, and I was recognising that I had seen all this before in the Boston area. So I had some idea what impact that was going to have on the city and communities like down in Grafton Gully, and made some efforts with limited time – and money at the time, with a young family starting off – and fortunately I could fudge some [photographic] paper for printing at work. Stan [Field’s employer] didn’t mind prudent use, didn’t want me to go too far with it.

So I started getting into my core early photography. Then, I forget exactly at what point, there was a thing where I was looking at people in isolation. I think this was around ’67. And every chance I got, lunchtime, I’d go down onto Queen Street and watch for things. Then friends would take me for little drives around the town ...  

Athol McCredie: So would you have met John Turner or Baigent first? As John tells it, you already knew Gary.

JF: Yep, from the Auckland pub scene. And then went to Wellington one time to meet John. And quite amazing, the energy the guy had at that stage. And I personally thought, Jesus, a real crazy. Love the guy. But his knowledge and enthusiasm for photography in general and embracing all different facets of it, his historical interest up to contemporary and looking at new directions ...

John Turner was doing pretty well – in fact, took me on board one time when I went to Wellington. That first time, he showed me about how I could probably improve on some of my prints – that was quite an eye-opener really. I thought, boy, you’ve really got to work to produce a good print. And Turner was adamant about: we’re talking world standards now. There was no compromise.

I had showed John Turner a lot of the early work. He was very encouraging. He had not seen anything with the precision coming out. For example, Baigent’s prints and things were rough as hell. John Turner suggested to Gary that we get together, so Gary came down to the lab.
He’d never seen a lab as well equipped as ours was – all that mod-con gear and the rest of it. I took him through some actual printing of his negatives, dodging and burning and how he can get the visual shifts to emphasise important areas in his work. And he was quite amazed and caught on very quickly, and really could see the direct merit in better-quality prints. And I gather later he showed a number of his new prints to John Turner, and Turner was very pleased with the quantum shift in the quality.

Richard Collins was, as an architect, far more technically understanding but could see the subtleties that you could put into a print, so he began embracing these standards as well. And Richard and I got along very well.

AM: I made a distinction between the Edward Weston tradition, if you like, and that represented by Walker Evans. I just wondered how you see – or do you see – there is a difference in that type of work?

JF: I think probably when I discovered Evans, I saw more relevance in the documenting that he was doing. I knew it was going to go, whereas I could appreciate Weston’s articulating the beautiful things he was doing. And that was largely the difference for me.

AM: So is the key idea this idea of the documenting, then?

JF: Yeah.

AM: That it’s grounded in the everyday interactions with the world?

JF: Sure. I mean, Weston with his Tina Modotti series and stuff like that, he was on a different track, he was on a more painterly track. And that’s how I would make the differentiation, and rightly so. I came across the Walker Evans book American Photographs. And honestly, that was an absolute revelation for me, in not only the social context but the 8x10, the treatment, and the relevance of photography in society and what it reflected, and what is at issue, and the evidence beyond the evidence, as it were.

AM: In 1970, you put together a little publication on a whole group of photographers called Photography, a Visual Dialect. How did that come about?

JF: We were then a gathered body of workers in collaboration in our own rights, and I thought, ‘Well, what the hell – let’s see if we can publish something.’ So I scouted around with this printer, and he said, ‘Yeah, we can put something together.’ We didn’t have any computers at the time, so it was just doing the text as best we could. It wasn’t easy!

AM: How was it financed? Did everyone put some money in?

JF: Yes. I forget how much. It wasn’t much, it was $50 or something like that. We were all strapped for cash but saw the merits in getting out there, and it was worthy of the effort. Which it certainly was.

AM: So there was no exhibition, was there? It was simply the book?

JF: Just the book. Later some of the images turned up.

AM: Did you in fact sell many copies?

JF: We did. Whitcoulls thought, ‘What is this nonsense?’ ‘Basically, it’s a non-profit kind of thing. We just want to meet costs. We’d like to get it out there.’ Then one of the buyers says, ‘OK, we’ll try it.’ There was a good bit of interest, and then in the pub with all the artists and things, because everyone knew everyone else, and everyone wanted a copy. So it got a little bit of circulation.

AM: What about the later exhibition and publication, 1973, that you featured in? How was that received? I’m talking about Three New Zealand Photographers: Baigent, Collins, and Fields.

JF: I think it was a revelation. It really was. Certainly a lot of younger photographers. You know, it wasn’t just the camera club. And the camera club people were saying, ‘What is this sort of stuff going on out there? It’s happy snaps. Anyone can photograph a brick wall. You’ve got to have a room full of lights and makeup and whatever.’ So I think the whole thing was a sense of timing – dare I say the exposure was right for the times that were changing. And a lot more people were taking up photography.

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