Back Story
I do not dream of Sussex Downs, Or quaint old English quaint old towns, I think of what may yet be seen In Johnsonville and Geraldine.
Denis Glover, Home Thoughts (1936)
In the mid-1960s a rookie photographer called John B. Turner roamed the streets of a plain Wellington suburb taking photographs of the built environment. Johnsonville then was experiencing a growth spurt which saw its population increase by nearly 40 per cent in the decade between 1956 and 1966. Until the later 1930s it had been a small, semi-rural settlement adjacent to the capital, but from 1938 it became the site of the new Labour government’s expanding housing scheme and it rapidly transformed into a dormitory suburb populated by young families, accruing the name of ‘nappy valley’, and attracting small businesses to support the rising population. It was quintessentially suburban, and became almost a symbol of such in newspaper reporting and in our literature. Socially and geographically it was somewhere between posh Khandallah and poor Porirua.
A recent publication from Te charts Turner’s progress from bewildered amateur photographer to a seminal figure in raising national awareness to the medium’s significance in and this country over the past half-century. This continuing latter role has tended to mask his own pursuits as a photographer, so that this series—his first coherent project as a documentary photographer, and a pivotal development in our photographic history—is only now, nearly 60 years later, being profiled. It has never been published or exhibited as a series, either whole or in part. Why? The wider and complex backstory is ably outlined at appropriate length in editor Athol McCredie’s introduction to already mentioned, but Turner’s specific case demands further elucidation. McCredie’s opening statement: ‘This book is about the beginnings of contemporary photography—also known as art photography—in New Zealand’ glides over an immense practical dilemma for anyone presently identifying as a documentary photographer (to the point that some, for commercial and career reasons, actively being identified as such). Given the complexity of this situation it is understandable the author employs such a simplistic conflation of ‘contemporary’ with ‘art photography’, even when his subject matter in this book is wholly based within the documentary tradition.
