Overview

A gull chick running across Muriwai Beach. Cabbage trees at Lake Wainamu. Tyre tracks, tugs of war and tramping trips. Olaf Petersen produced an unrivalled photographic account of the people and natural world of Auckland's wild west coast. Nature Boy introduces readers to this remarkable photographer and the landscape he made his own. Olaf Petersen (1915-1994) grew up in Swanson and acquired his first camera aged eighteen in 1933. For the next fifty years this master of the Rolleiflex TLR and the Hasselblad 500 produced over 50,000 images charting the human impact on New Zealand's natural environment. In this book, essays by Shaun Higgins, Andrew Clifford and Kirstie Ross chronicle Petersen's methods and techniques, his relationship to the 'camera club' photographers and the emerging photographic avant-garde, and his links to the trampers and scientists who engaged with the natural world of the Waitakere coast. Those essays are framed by reflections from two life-long daughters of the west, Sarah Hillary and Sandra Coney. Throughout, almost a hundred of Petersen's evocative photographs provide a compelling visual narrative. This beautiful book, published to coincide with a major exhibition at Tamaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum, captures a seminal figure in twentieth-century New Zealand nature photography and the remarkable landscape he documented.

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9781869409500

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CATHERINE HAMMOND is head of documentary heritage at Tamaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum and was previously research library manager at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. Recent book projects include Archives of Emotion (Auckland Museum, 2021) and, for Auckland Art Gallery, Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys (co-published with Auckland University Press, 2019), John Nixon: Abstraction (2018), Lisa Reihana's Emissaries (2018) and In Pursuit of Venus (2015), Frances Hodgkins: Forgotten Still Life (2015) and Modern Paints Aotearoa (2014). She was managing editor of Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture (2007-18) and honorary secretary of the Colin McCahon Research & Publication Trust (2014-19). She has an MA in library and information studies from Victoria University of Wellington and a BA in art history from the University of Auckland. SHAUN HIGGINS is curator pictorial at Tamaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum. His research interests range from early photographic history in both technology and practice, to its role in documenting social history, conflict and landscape. He engages in the process of photography with cameras old and new, and has applied both historical and technical knowledge to exhibitions for two decades, ranging from Sir Edmund Hillary: Everest and Beyond (2002) to Photographing Early Auckland (2019). Recent research includes a chapter on Clement L. Wragge's magic lantern lectures in The Magic Lantern at Work: Witnessing, Persuading, Experiencing and Connecting (Routledge, 2020); articles 'An Early Photographic View of Auckland' (Back Story: Journal of New Zealand Art, Media & Design History, 2018), 'Daguerreotypes by Hartley Webster' (Journal of New Zealand Art, Media & Design History, 2016) and 'Early New Zealand Daguerreotypes' (The Daguerreian Annual, 2015); and the book The Anzacs: An Inside View of New Zealanders at Gallipoli (Penguin Random House, 2015). He has an MA, BA and PGDip from the University of Auckland in anthropology, art history and museum studies, and further qualifications in photography and care and identification of photographs.

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