Blog

Peter was a great believer in communicating about photography and got into blogging in its early days.

His blog ran, with some gaps, from 30 November 2006 to 2 September 2018.

You can visit the earliest entries via archived links on the right hand side of this page.


Monday

It’s taking me hours today to assemble a letter to the editor of the Taranaki daily newspaper. I still haven’t completed it but I want to get it away today because Council elections are this weekend.

The Len Lye Foundation want to demolish the Regent building for their World Centre for Len Le. As it happens I am particularly fond of the Regent. It’s right next door to the Govett-Brewster. The Govett-Brewster admin are enthusiastic about the project which is unfortunate because I’m a ratepayer in New Plymouth and I don’t enjoy my money being spent in this way. The Council so far, while not unanimously behind the Foundation’s activities, have offered no resistance to the destruction of this landmark, although what I’m discovering is that a lot of people, both pro and anti the Foundation’s goals, don’t realise that this building is to go.

I have made postings about this before. Here is one of them.

The large photos in the windows are mine. The owner of the building before the Council purchased it, gave me the use of the corner room to put up a drive-by show. It was between tenants.


The Smile

Another of the weird and wonderful treasures from the Southland Museum storeroom. You could leave me there for weeks. Just leave me some sandwiches at the door from time to time.

I’ve always been interested in dentistry and not only because I have been on the receiving end of copious quantities of it.

The museum even has one of the foot driven drills used by dental nurses during my childhood. They also have one of the later models that had small electric motors attached. Slow revving with blunt burs they were not for the fainthearted.

Last year I had my snaggled and broken top teeth replaced with implants. Here are the titanium posts were screwed into my top jaw. I was showing them off to everyone. No one was safe. I was stopping people in the street.

I regret that New Zealand doesn’t have a dental museum. I visited on in London once. It had teeth very like these carved from hippopotamus bone, it had Roman dental instruments, it even had a reconstructed Victorian surgery. Yum.


Puffer 2

As a response to my posting about the Puffer fish lamp, Denys Watkins kindly sent me this file of one of his recent paintings.

Communications


This structure is near the airport in Invercargill. Not sure what it’s for but I like its sculptural quality. Something to do with communications I imagine, perhaps radar. I’ll ask around today.

It does bring to mind the subject matter that two German photographers, husband and wife Bernd and Hilla Becher worked with for nearly 50 years. Bernd Hiller died in June this year.

Burwell House, Invercargill.


The grand house on the left is where I am living. It comes with the William Hodges Fellowship. The house on the right is used by the Southland Museum for storage.

These buildings are an old maternity hospital, and I regularly meet people who say that they were born in one of these rooms. Rohan Wealleans is one.


What theme is that?

I am often asked by interviewers, frequently students, what my themes are.

It’s a difficult question, however the photo above illustrates one that is definitely a theme that pops up again and again in my pictures.

I seem to be interested in the question, is this real or not? In this case the cat is fake, on display in a shop window.


Puffer Fish Lamp

As the William Hodges Fellow I an under the aegis of the Southland Museum. Last Thursday I was invited to have a look at some of the treasures that they have in their stockroom.

Here is one of them. A lamp made from a Puffer Fish aka Fugu a Japanese delicacy. A deadly poison if cooked incorrectly.

There is a frisson here. A fish with a light inside. The Surrealists would have approved.

Titanic

Today I received a kind call on my mobile telling me that at a fair in Queens Park there was an inflatable sinking Titanic that I might be interested in.

I immediately hurried up there, about 2 minutes by car. I hurried in case something changed such as the weather. Some hoons with mullets mocked me as I stood in front of the Titanic with my camera but I ignored them, one advantage of being older and not being so reactive, although secretly I would have liked to have scragged them.

Now I am wondering if I should go back there first thing in the morning and see if I couldn’t reshoot this with the red plastic fence and the ropes removed, with the ship cleaned up there could be a photo here.

Writers who visited New Zealand.

I was recently given a most interesting book: From the Writer’s Notebook , Around New Zealand with 80 Authors, by Lydia Monin pub Reed 2006.

I was surprised at the number of famous authors who have visited New Zealand. Rudyard Kipling, Noel Coward, George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Anthony Trollope, J.B. Priestley, to name a few.

I was particularly interested to read how Mark Twain arrived at Bluff by ship and travelled into Invercargill to deliver a sold-out lecture in the Theatre Royal.


Model

A model in the window of an art material shop in Invercargill.

Now that I have a truly pocket sized camera, I find that I am taking a lot more photos than I ever have before. I seem to have loosened up a bit in my picture making, not that they are all grand opera of course, more like practising my scales.

While out walking one evening, I took this one through a window, using a flash.

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