John B Turner, interviewed by curator Athol McCredie, 2011

‘We should be photographing things that are important to us.’

– John B Turner

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Transcript
Athol McCredie: You were showing work in the camera club situation. When did you start taking photographs which you could see as outside of that sort of environment? What were you doing?

John B Turner: By ’65, I was moving away from the camera club. For me, a major influence was, for instance, Wayne Millar – you know, the Magnum photographer, the guy who helped [Edward] Steichen do The Family of Man. I was discovering people like [Josef] Sudek, who people later cottoned on to. You know, [André] Kertész. I was picking up Bill Brandt, Dorothea Lange – all those kind of people. I was actually picking up on quite a broad range. My interests have always been very catholic. A lot of different styles, different kind of work that I personally enjoy, but not necessarily that I would make.

Basically, I was turning to look at my own situation. I’d always done things like photograph my workmates at the printing office and things like that. Then I turned on photographing Johnsonville. That was in ’66. At that stage, I was testing out the Zone System. I was following Ansel Adams and [Paul] Strand, people like that. Then The Photographer’s Eye came along in ’67, and that really broadened my knowledge.

The Photographer’s Eye show was just so important – it was the first time I could actually see a [Edward] Weston. I would go up to the museum. In those days they had daylight coming through, and on Edward Weston’s White Church at Hornitos the print just glowed. It was extraordinary. The illusion was even greater than being there. I imagine being there at the church when he took that picture – it wasn’t quite so glowy. But isolated and framed tightly and shown in immaculate detail with no sense of grain, and beautiful tonal range, it just glowed. Charles Scheeler’s picture of the train engine with the steam puffed out: that’s still one of the most gorgeous prints I’ve ever seen. So they become the new standard.
The series I did on my parents’ home, that’s also post-The Photographer’s Eye. That was the stimulus for that portrait of Mum and Dad. We should be photographing things that are important to us, not any old crap just to show off. I tried to get photographs of my mother with 35mm with no success because she always didn’t like being photographed. Never could do it. But at least with a formal occasion, that kind of took them over. I kind of got it that way. I’m basically a diarist with a camera, I use it as a diary.

AM: You co-organised a couple of meetings in Wellington in 1970. The idea was to bring together people interested in photography, and one of these marked the beginning of what later became Photo-Forum magazine.

JT: At the second one, it was at the museum. That’s where we met Bruce Weatherall. And Bruce, being a journalist, got stuck in. I was working slowly, trying to build up contacts and figure out how to get the money so we could do a decent publication. But he just went in and launched a little cyclostyled beast called New Zealand Photographic Art and History.

AM: So you envisaged something a bit flasher than that?

JT: Yeah, for sure. I was looking at Creative Camera, Camera magazine, and Aperture. They were the main ones. Basically, Bruce put the energy into that. He wanted to get something going straight away. It was better than nothing, but it was ugly as hell. It didn’t have any pictures in it. I pushed him to get pictures in the next issue. I was always hankering after doing a better publication.

It used to irk me. I’m from the printing trade too. I’d been looking at flash printing in Aperture and all that. It irked me how roughly we were doing things. But it was good – it was a vehicle for reviewing shows and showing what was being done, so it was very good like that.

Then, basically, I still had in the back of my mind I wanted to see us have a decent magazine, so I hoped that that would grow into that. So it went from Photographic Art and History to New Zealand Photography magazine, which was more what it was about. Then it started to deteriorate at the end, so it was a chance for me to put into practice the sort of things I’d been preparing to do.

So I got as many people as I could to promise some money to start Photo-Forum, which was incorporated at the end of December, I think, ’73. And the first issue was out about February or March. I don’t know quite how we got it out so quickly. But as you know, it was a bimonthly A4 magazine. God knows how we did it. Well, I know how I did it now. It was because Elam was small. The art school had a limited roll of 150 students total, and I was largely protected from admin-type work by Tom [Hutchins]. He did most of that and let me get on with it, so it gave me extra time and energy to put into Photo-Forum. So that was great.

We’d started the workshops. They were, of course, really influential because that’s when you got your Peter Peryers and Robin Morrison. All sorts of people came along and upped the ante through the workshop stimulation. And of course I was pushing, not only trying to encourage them to do better but to do portfolios, shows, publish, start galleries – the sort of things that we did at the time. So things kind of burgeoned from there.

AM: Tell me about the Baigent, Collins, and Fields exhibition.

JT: That really came out of the survey – when I was trying to do a survey of contemporary photography that I’d hoped that the National Art Gallery would run. Then it became clear that they wouldn’t. For me, they were the most fresh, because I didn’t really know them well. I was keen to know them, and their work seemed to be the work that was pointing ahead mostly, seemed to be some of the most contemporary work. And so I suggested that show to the Auckland City Art Gallery.

Looking back, I think it was a good show. The work was pretty carefully selected. I’d put quite a lot of time and thought into which images I thought should be in and which shouldn’t be. I’ve got no complaints about it.

The intro was Szarkowski influenced, taking a leaf out of The Photographer’s Eye or The Art of Photography. It was quite reasonable. You can see in the introduction I talk about Baigent’s little sparrow on the gorse bush [Tomtit, Taipo Valley, Westland, 1967]. The attempt there is to try to ease people into understanding photographs. You do look at them and you think about all the components. You think about the content, and the form, what was the point of view of the photographer, etc. So it was, as these things tend to be, fairly didactic. But not overly, I hope.

AM: The whole thing was entirely your conception?

JT: Yeah.

AM: The photographers didn’t come to you?

JT: No, I had all this stuff on my hands. I had all the research I was doing and looking for outcomes, vehicles for showing the work, putting it out there.

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