Oblong as an Egg, Flat as a Stone as a Jungle
Bruce Connew is a New Zealand photographer and artist who has made images since the early 1970s.
He earned wide respect for his work with the New Zealand Listener before setting afloat his independent, project-based work with the 1985 book and exhibition series South Africa. His photographic practice evinces a fascination with language and storytelling, expressing itself in a wide variety of modes. In some cases his photographs complement another writer’s story, or rather the writer’s story complements his series, while in other instances he is the author. Some projects include no text at all. His current project about the New Zealand Wars centres around photographing the text that appears on gravestones and memorials, which is an unusual way of combining textual and visual elements. I asked him how he decided what kind of text should go with a given set of photographs? Did he typically start with the images and then develop a text, or do the two emerge simultaneously?
Bruce Connew: My processes have remained pretty much the same since my first social and political project. I have read, and continue to, extensively and eclectically. Many moons ago, I eschewed university for a woolstore, after a fabulous last year at school where, in English and History, vigorous opinions counted for more than irritating facts. I have in my wake all manner of occupations, some unpleasant, some uplifting, and always amongst people, working people to professional, and a plethora in between.
I skirmished at an art school south of London for a single year, when I very vaguely figured photography could be my means of expression. Art-school tutors and their exasperating exercises weren’t for me. I chose to endlessly hang out in the school’s wondrous library, kicking off in one corner and reading my way around the shelves for months and months, anything and everything, books of photography, books about photography, and plenty beyond: from Henri Cartier-Bresson images, Robert Frank’s The Americans, not quite grasping either, to a swashbuckling David Douglas Duncan’s Yankee Nomad, to Words and Pictures by Wilson Hicks; R. Smith Schumann’s Photographic Communication led to Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers. And then there were Man Ray, Callahan, Minor White, Brassaï, Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Julia Margaret Cameron, Gertrude Käsebier, Walker Evans, Atget, Uelsmann, Koudelka, Weston, Stieglitz, Arbus, Eisenstaedt, McCullin, Eugene Smith, Gordon Parks and many more, a bringing to light.
The , a paperback book of a series of lectures delivered by Igor Stravinsky at Harvard University in 1939–40, presented itself one morning. While dealing with the philosophy of music was very far from my capacity, I flicked open the pages and read (my copy still has its underlines):
