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.

Conus Litteratus

I have been thinking about this photo for a few months, and have now decided that I am going to print up an edition. I am fond of this entire Conus genus, or is it family, of shells, found in various forms all over the Indo-Pacific region.
This is a Conus marmoreus that I photographed about 10 years ago. It became one of the most popular photos that I ever made. The idea for it came from a 1650 Rembrandt etching that I saw in Germany. I bought the shell in Germany as well. An interesting point about the Rembrandt etching is that the shell is in reverse, the opening of the shell always goes the other way. He must have etched it the correct way around, and then in the etching process it became reversed.

In 2001, as I collected more of these shells,
I made a new version, this one with two shells.

In turn, this reminded me of a still life that I made in 1982.
I still have the waste paper basket.

Music
Recently, on my 65th birthday, I decided that it was time for me to begin learning the piano. Living on my own and quite a distance from my nearest neighbours is a big help.
It means that I can practise pretty much whenever I want, and while I may be lacking in skill I make up for in motivation.

A bonus for me is that I have quite a lot of written music in the house. I find it an inspiration just to look at it even if I am years away from being able to play much of it.

I love the look of music and above have posted one of my favourites. It is some Bach. There is something about the arrangement of notes that thrills me. What it sounds like I don’t know, unless I resort to a CD. (click on the image to make it bigger.)

The second photo is one I made perhaps 20 years ago. I even called it Zoo Music.

At the same time as Zoo Music, I was obsessed with the idea of photographing mathematical calculations in particular those of Albert Einstein who died in 1955. In a biography I saw some of the pages that contained his last calculations. They looked so interesting, purely from a visual point of view, even though I am reasonable at maths I couldn’t follow them in the least. The papers were, I think, in an archive at Princeton Unversity, and I remember at the time being keen to go to Princeton to make a photo. Unfortunately it is a long way away and I didn’t make it.

The closest that I got to Einstein was to visit Lawrence, Kansas, where until the late 90’s his brain resided. It was then sent to Princeton.


Stick Insect.

About 20 years ago I took this photo of a stick insect. I sold the only print that I made to the Auckland Art Gallery and since then I have not been able to find the negative, thereby making it a very rare image. To my knowledge it has never been reproduced.

The Auckland Art Gallery is possibly unique among New Zealand public galleries in that it has its collection on-line. Here is a link to the opening page, although it does require you to click a box saying that you accept the conditions of browsing through it.


When I took this photo I was particularly interested in camouflage.




When in Wellington, I went to a very convivial post-opening party, at the Southern Cross Hotel.
I noticed these candles sitting on a shelf over a big fireplace. I left the party, walked back to my accomodation, picked up my camphone which foolishly I hadn’t taken with me in the first place, walked back to the bar, and took this little picture. (incidentally, click on image above and it will come up bigger).

Meanwhile, it got me thinking about the similarities between this candle photo and one that I took of an et al sculpture, shown here at the Govett-Brewster, in New Plymouth, a couple of years ago.

I can see how there are certain visual similarities between the two subjects. I must have been photographing the et al, primarily because of the shapes within it.


Weta 1999
330 x 500 mm
silver gelatin print.

In daylight hours cave weta like to roost in caves or at least in dark overhanging places such as under a rock. They are very quiet, in fact they have no ears and make no sound. There are 60 species of cave weta in New Zealand. They can jump 2 metres.

These cave weta are in the Waitakeres, in West Auckland and are sitting on concrete.


Weta

On returning home I was welcomed by this weta clinging to my backdoor. For overseas
visitors to my site, these are native cricket-like insects that have, in the absence of land mammals here in New Zealand, taken over the ecological niche usually occupied by rats & mice. Flightless, they prefer to forage at night.

This weta is welcome, because its presence is a sign to me that the biodiversity of this 1/4 acre is improving.

Neil Dawson‘s Ferns 1998

In Civic Square, outside the Wellington City Gallery. I was there along with
several hundred others over the weekend because Telecom Prospect 2007, opened on Saturday evening. Of the 43 artists in the show (not me) 35 were in attendance.

Here is the City Gallery itself. Originally it was a library. The library
is now in the blue building on the left.

I will write something about the Prospect exhibition. I’m thinking about what I want to say, and how I’m going to say it.

Sandpit Scene
2007
This is the sandpit in Ponsonby cafe. Once again I recognise this photo. I have taken many versions of it in the past couple of years, although I don’t think that I have released any of them. There seems to be something about randomness that attracts me. I’ll keep working with these images until either I get over it, or I start publishing them in ways other than on this site.
After morning coffee with a client, I taxi to Auckland airport and then fly to Wellington. My first stop there will be with Paul Craig a framer, to see about having some of my photos framed. After that I go to a city hotel, and over the next couple of days, until I fly back to New Plymouth on Sunday, catch up with a few friends, and have a general relax I hope.
One thing that I want to do is to go to Te Papa, to see a show that includes, I believe, three of my photos. I say believe, because in line with normal practice of public galleries in this country, they don’t automatically inform artists when their work is included in exhibitions. This is a show of 300 works from their collection that took them 14 months to put together.

Shop Window
in High St, Auckland today. The ease of my camphone is enabling me to
takes snaps of anything that might catch my eye, in a very unobtrusive way too. There is considerable freedom there.
I recognise this photo as a template that I frequently return to.

Japanese Politics

In the posting below, done last night, I mentioned that here in Auckland I am enjoying watching NHK, a Japanese television channel, similar to the BBC in quality.

There are elections coming up in Japan, and this screen has something to do with those.
I can’t read what this says, my Japanese daughter-in-law kindly translated it for me.
I have photographed it just because I like the shapes, colours, the overall effect of it. Probably it would not be possible to fully explain why I am attracted arrangements of shapes like this.

I did appreciate more fully, when Michiko was translating, however, that she was using the pictorial nature of this script to give her clues to the meaning. And I also appreciated how they must find reading English difficult, it having no picture clues at all in the words. Reading this script must require two different parts of the brain. They are not trying to crack the meaning of the word just by sounding it out alone as we do.

Incidentally, there are about 40,000 of these kanji.
And I should add that the little bit of simpler writing in the lower middle of the picture is katakana, which are the shapes Japanese use to write English words. Derived from kanji they are though, largely phonetic.
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