Travelling times gone by through an amateur photographer’s album.
The photos have a quality that tells you they are not from now. The grain is fine, the light natural and the colours vigorous. The compositions disclose something about the photographer; you can hear him thinking, see him learning, his light-caught journey exposed, frame by frame.
Nature-lover and self-taught photographer David Owen has loved Te Waipounamu / the South Island since his first trip there in the seventies. Entranced by the ever-changing colours of the mountains, the snow, the lakes and the rivers, he kept returning year after year throughout the eighties and nineties. The result is a collection of thousands of images, now indexed and carefully stored at his home in Masterton.
David was born in Wellington in 1938 and raised in Tawa. He moved to Featherston in 1960 and became a chicken farmer, where he married Rosemary Sutherland in 1963 (“a great partner to me,” he says). They had four children, three boys and a girl. Sadly, two of the boys died in infancy. The family moved to Gisborne in 1970, where David worked in the telephone exchange for 10 years. He also worked for 15 years at Gisborne Hospital.
Throughout this time, David tramped many hundreds of kilometres clutching the basic little 35mm camera his parents had brought him back from Fiji in 1967, photographing many areas of Aotearoa New Zealand, including much of the South Island. He explored in summer and in winter, but the season that ignited a fire in his heart was autumn, in particular April, when he saw beauty wherever he aimed.
In 1980, when it became obvious he had reached the limits of the 35mm’s capability (a friend noted David’s photos were “flat”, lacking a depth of field, an opinion confirmed by Chromatek and Processing in Pukekohe), David took a deep breath, went to the bank and raised a $1000 loan. He bought a second-hand Hasselblad camera — the brand the astronauts took to the moon. It was the first of three Hasselblads he has owned. The new camera got David into part-time wedding photography, which helped finance his many trips to the South Island from 1981 to 2019, almost always in April. It was a wonderful time. He would head off in his old Vanguard and call in on friends on the way. One, a glazier, replaced a broken windscreen after David had driven 100 kilometres through snow to reach their home. He was back on the road by noon the next day. No charge.
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They say with a digital camera, you can shoot first, think later, but with a film camera it’s the opposite. David took early retirement after having a tumour removed and moved back to Wairarapa, where he continued taking photos with a new camera, a Nikon P1000. In 2022, David suffered a stroke which immobilised his right side. No more mountains and lakes and rivers, for now, but he still has the photos. Memories for him, but for us a glimpse of landscapes that are familiar, yet somehow more remote than the ones we know now. Time stopped places, fine-grained, written in light.
