Overview
While working in his day job as a Kodak sales representative, Terry O’Connor (1946-2004) worked on a number of documentary photography projects over 20 years of his spare time. These include photographing in the homes of Samoans who worked at the Kodak factory in Auckland; the lives of racehorse jockeys; children in health camps; and the Tuhoe people on their land. This 2010 acquisition includes a selection from each of these bodies of work.
In the time-honoured tradition of documentary photography O’Connor’s work brings to wider attention the lives of people who are not part of the mainstream. And with the passing of time his images not only show how things are elsewhere, but were. His photographs of Sāmoan immigrants, for example, are really the only visual record made of those who rode the wave of Pacific migration to New Zealand in the 1970s. And the lifestyle enjoyed by Tūhoe in the Ureweras has changed in many ways since O’Connor took his photographs in the 1980s.