worm, root, wort… & bane

worm, root, wort… & bane
by Ann Shelton

Artist Ann Shelton’s latest book, worm, root, wort… & bane delves into the rich history of plant-centric belief systems and their suppression. Part artist scrapbook, part photo book, part quotography, and part exhibition catalogue, this publication explores the medicinal, magical, and spiritual uses of plant materials, once deeply intertwined with the lives of European forest, nomadic, and ancient peoples.

worm, root, wort… & bane re-assembles fragments of historical knowledge alongside the first 19 artworks from Shelton’s photographic series, i am an old phenomenon (2022-ongoing). The plant sculptures photographed are constructed by the artist, who has worked with plants since childhood and long been interested in the history of floral art and its expansive gendered resonances.

Overflowing with 300+ images and quotations, this book traces the loss of plant knowledge held wise women, witches, and wortcunners in post-feudal Europe, as Christianity spread and capitalism emerged. The book follows our changing relationships with plants, through the Victorian era to the present — offering cause to reflect on the consequences of the ongoing estrangement between humans and the natural world.

worm, root, wort… & bane features a multiplicity of voices, reflecting the assorted and sometimes conflicting beliefs that are held about plants, gender, and sexuality. Adopting an intersectional approach, the book quotes historical accounts, herbal advice, folk knowledge, and artist research, and draws from art, literature, film, and television.

The book also features new essays by photographic curator Susan Bright and Victoria Munro, Executive Director of Alice Austen House, as well as The Three Fates, a short story by New Zealand writer Pip Adam, written in response to Ann Shelton’s research.


Ann Shelton, Pākehā/Italian (b. 1967, Aotearoa New Zealand) received her MFA from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. She lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, New Zealand and exhibits internationally. Her most recent museum survey, Dark Matter, curated by Zara Stanhope (Director, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Ngāmotu New Plymouth, Aotearoa New Zealand), was hosted by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in 2016 and toured to Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū in 2017. Shelton’s award-winning work has been extensively written about and reviewed in publications including Artforum, Hyperallergic, Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies, artnet news, The Art Newspaper, and the Evergreen Review. Her works are included in public and private collections throughout Aotearoa New Zealand and in the United States.

Shelton is Honorary Research Fellow in Photography at Whiti o Rehua, School of Art, Massey University, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa.

Shelton works with Over and Under Fine Art in New York, and Two Rooms in Aotearoa.

Publication date: March, 2024
Flexicover | 132 x 210 x 25mm | 312 pages |
ISBN 979-8-9888148-0-1

RRP $48  Available Late March 2024
Limited number available in NZ – pre-purchase now to secure your copy.

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There Is Nowhere to Go, There Is Nothing to Do

There Is Nowhere to Go, There Is Nothing to Do
Greta Anderson with essays by Hanna Scott and David Eggleton

“In Greta’s images ordinary things radiate mystery, haloed by an ecstatic glow. Her pictures traverse eerie latitudes; they are brushed by the phantasmagoric; they pulse with a visceral brightness.”
At the Edge of a Dark Forest, David Eggleton

This book brings together a selection of photographs produced between 1997 and 2022 by Tāmaki Makaurau based artist Greta Anderson, a prolific photographer, film maker and musician. For over a quarter century, Anderson has been capturing dramatic scenes in films and photographs that quietly reference intensely personal narratives. There Is Nowhere to Go, There Is Nothing to Do presents Anderson’s works, covering genres as wide as portraits, still life, wild and domesticated landscape and suburban tableau. The book is curated and designed by New Public, offering a fresh juxtapositions of images from a wide range of series and one-off artist books Greta made over the decades, from the classic Stand-ins (2001), Uncomfortable Conversations (2005), Optimistic Tragedy (2008), to more recent No Hording (2021) and The Transcenders (2021).

The book features two newly commissioned essays by long-time friend and supporter of Greta’s work, Hanna Scott, and esteemed poet laureate David Eggleton.

Listen to Greta Anderson’s strange, psychically charged images of the ordinary Culture 101, RNZ – fun-facts-filled interview with Greta Anderson by Mark Amery.

Greta Anderson is an Aotearoa New Zealand musician, photographer and teacher. She exhibits regularly at Two Rooms Gallery in Tāmaki Makarau Auckland. Her work has been shown at many venues for international contemporary art and photography including The Australian Centre for Photography (Sydney), The Museum of Photographic Arts (San Diego), The Ringling Museum of Art (Sarasota, Florida) and the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney).

David Eggleton is a writer based in Ōtepoti Dunedin. He was the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate 2019 -2022. He has won a number of awards for his writing, including the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2016. His books include Towards Aotearoa: A Short History of Twentieth Century New Zealand Art; and Into the Light: a History of New Zealand Photography; and Ready to Fly: the Story of New Zealand Rock Music; and Seasons: Four Essays on the New Zealand Year. He is a regular art reviewer for a variety of publishing platforms.

Hanna Scott met Greta Anderson as the newly-minted Interim Director at Artspace on Karangahape Road in 2002. She has written about Greta’s work four times over two decades. Twice for the NZ Journal of Photography, for Landfall and for Art New Zealand. Hanna is an experienced contemporary art curator, programme manager and researcher, based in Tāmaki Makaurau since 2002. Her writing is published in broadsheets, magazines and books in Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, New Zealand and the USA.

New Public is a design and publishing project based in Tāmaki Makaurau. It collaborates with artists and institutions to exhibit research devoted to the discussion of contemporary visual and material culture. Titles include On the Last Afternoon: Disrupted Ecologies in the work of Joyce Campbell, Sternberg Press, Berlin, and Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi at Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, 2020; Qianye Lin and Qianhe ‘AL’ Li,Thus the Blast Carried It, Into the World 它便随着爆破, 冲向了世界, Coastal Signs and New Public, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, 2021; The Dialogics of Contemporary Art: Painting Politics, Kerber, Bielefeld and Berlin, 2022.


ISBN: 978-1-99-116522-0

Pages: 128pp, with colour reproduction
Format: Hardback
Dimensions: 288mm x 220mm
RRP $50.00

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A garden is a long time

A garden is a long time
Annemarie Hope-Cross and Jenny Bornholdt

The photographs in A garden is a long time take us beyond the perimeter of the Central Otago garden where they were created. Incorporating processes and materials from the darker, more mysterious corners of early photographic history, the images offer an account of the life and sensibility of a remarkable artist, Annemarie Hope-Cross (1968–2022). With Jenny Bornholdt’s poetry and prose treading deftly around the edges of Annemarie’s life and photographic work, A garden is a long time is a meditation on time, light and the spaces we all inhabit.

For Annemarie Hope-Cross, photography was, at once, a science and a miracle; the camera was an echo chamber and each photograph was a place where past and present met, where the living communed with those lost along the way, and where the most ordinary plants and objects were rendered mysterious, at times radiant. These photographic exposures, and the words that accompany them, are the heartfelt measure of an hour, a day, a season, a lifetime.

Published by Te Herenga Waka Press in association with Rim Books.

Annemarie Hope-Cross was born in Upper Hutt in 1968, obtained a Diploma of Photographic Arts from Whitecliffe Art School in 1989, and in 2011 and 2013 studied photogenic drawing, wet and dry plate collodion and the daguerreotype technique at the Fox Talbot Museum in the United Kingdom. Between 2010 and 2021, she held 13 solo exhibitions at public and private galleries in the Otago region, and her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions in New Zealand and internationally. She held an artist’s residency at the Fox Talbot Museum in 2013), and her series of ‘Still’ photographs is in the collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. With Eric Schusser, she produced two photo-books, Still Intrusion (2019) and Dissolving Margins (2020).

Jenny Bornholdt has published over a dozen books of poems, most recently Lost and Somewhere Else (2019). She has edited a number of anthologies, including Short Poems of New Zealand (2018), and has worked on numerous book and art projects with artists including Pip Culbert, Mary McFarlane, Noel McKenna, Mari Mahr, Brendan O’Brien and Gregory O’Brien. In 2018 she was the co-recipient, with Gregory O’Brien, of the Henderson Arts Trust Residency and spent 12 months in Alexandra, Central Otago, during which time she met Annemarie Hope-Cross.

ISBN: 9781776920839

Pages: 152pp, with 90 colour photos
Format: Hardback
Dimensions: 250mm x 200mm
RRP $50.00

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Dad, Pete, Opa. Tim Veling, XYZ books (Lisbon) edition.

Further views on link with the cover.

Dad, Pete, Opa.
Tim J. Veling
XYZ book (Lisbon) edition

“I have been admitted to hospital. Please don’t worry, but call me when you can. Lots of love, D,P,O.”

It was always how he signed off; shorthand for Dad, Pete, Opa. Tim J. Veling would soon learn his father had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer with an estimated three months to live. The rug was suddenly pulled out from under his feet.

D,P,O is a record of those last, precious months. The photographs are testament to not only the grief that father and son worked through together, but more importantly the love and admiration they shared; an account of the inevitable slowing of one life set to a backdrop of a new life and relationships thriving. Intensely moving in its unflinching intimacy and honesty, D,P,O reminds us that while death comes to us all, we must live in the present and treasure deeply the company of people we hold dear. For within those that remain, love and life endure. Tim J. Veling, Dad, Pete, Opa.

Original project outline in website Place in Time: The Christchurch Documentary Project.

Review by Hamish Petersen in Contemporaryhum.com

Photographs: Tim J. Veling

Editing and Sequencing: Tim J. Veling

Design: Joana Durães

Prepress: Pedro Guimarães

Production: Tiago Casanova and Pedro Guimarães

Printing: Gráfica Maiadouro

2022

XYZ Books

144 pages

21,5 x 26 cm

Offset Print
First edition

ISBN: 978-989-53182-8-5

RRP $85 shipped from Aotearoa

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Return to Monte Cassino

Return to Monte Cassino: The 2nd NZEF War Veterans Remember Italy
Maree Frewen-Wilks, with an introduction by Peter Arnett and an essay by Matthew Wright

This book was conceived and produced by a Southland photojournalist Maree Frewyn-Wilks when she accompanied the New Zealand veterans attending the official functions in Italy in 2004 during the 60th Anniversary of the Battle of Monte Cassino. Her photographic essay features as a diary of the travel, visits to cemeteries, social and official events.

What makes this book a unique contribution to New Zealand war histories is the inclusion of veterans’ personal accounts, together with their thoughts and poems about Cassino and accompanied by portraits and profiles. These are complemented by previously unpublished photographs of Monte Cassino and surrounds, from their albums 1943–1945.

 

“These wonderful images depict the soldiers’ life with civilians, during battle and barren scenery spotlighting bomb craters, ammunition identifying tons of rubble. The images provide proof that life away from home was in fact – War.”

Maree Frewyn-Wilks

 

Weaved through the New Zealand veterans’ stories from 1944 and 2004 are:

 

Matthew Wright, one of New Zealand’s most published historians, has written a chapter on the battle of Monte Cassino, which provides a wider context of the New Zealand involvement, the battle and the bravery of all soldiers including the Germans and our own 28th Maori Battalion.

 

A German Paratrooper Bob Frettlohr has written his memories of the Battle of Monte Cassino and his thoughts about Cassino now. Hans Fredrick Meyer tells how the next generations see the Commemorations of the 60th Anniversary of the Battle of Monte Cassino.

 

The New Zealand burials in Cassino Commonwealth Cemetery are documented, with the list of the Soldier’s rank, army number, family, age, date of death and from what town in New Zealand he came. The members of the Southland contingent found fellow Southland soldiers who became casualties during the Battle of Cassino. The ode was recited, a poppy was placed and a Spirit of Southland Flag was placed on the headstone. Some of the graves visited are at the rear of the book.

 

The photographs in this book were compiled as Monte Cassino Exhibition, and Maree was the guest artist for the 70th Anniversary of the Battle of Monte Cassino in 2014. The exhibition was displayed at the Cassino Military Museum and was donated to the people of Cassino. Record of these events appears towards the rear of the book.

 

Hard-cover, section-sewn | 336 pages  300mm x 265mm landscape B&W reproduction
ISBN 978-0-473-36878-4
Self published: 2017

RRP $70  (NB. Over 2 kg and shipped from Invercargill)

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LA Botanical

LA Botanical
Joyce Campbell
Foreword by Dr Susan Ballard, essay by Tessa Laird

LA Botanical is a series of ambrotype photographs of plant specimens found in the greater Los Angeles area. It was conceived by the multidisciplinary artist Joyce Campbell in the wake of Hurricane Katrina which devastated the Gulf Coast of Louisiana in 2005. The aftermath, particularly the inability and unwillingness of the Federal Government to respond to the crisis in flooded New Orleans, highlighted the vulnerability of a populace stranded in the face of natural, and human induced calamity in the world’s most powerful nation. As a mother raising her young child in a sprawling American city Campbell was compelled to ask: when the supply chain is disrupted and the supermarkets are empty, and there is no sign of aid reaching you, how can ‘art’ be useful? 

Campbell was raised on pastureland dotted with remnants of native bush inland from Wairoa township, on Aotearoa New Zealand’s rural East Coast. Her family were farmers, botanists and gardeners. Upon migrating to Los Angeles in 1999, she observed a fundamentally alien relationship between the city and its vegetation. Plants that had been introduced by waves of immigrants for food, fuel or medicine had gradually run wild across the city scape, the knowledge of their utility lost to time and neglect induced by a form of industrialized capitalism that was both aggressive and immersive. This book sets out to reveal the breadth of attributes ascribed to the weeds of Los Angeles via the enchantment of its seductive contents: plants rendered ethereal by the wet-plate photographic process that emerged simultaneous with the city itself.

Tessa Laird, in her essay within this volume, calls this book “. . . a poisoner’s handbook, a herbalist’s cure-all, a shaman’s bundle, a gardener’s guide, a botanist’s field manual, an artist’s scrapbook.” It can be all these things. This book is multidisciplinary in its scope, but it exists primarily as an artwork.

The first-edition was published in 2007, to accompany the exhibition LA Botanical at G727 – a Los Angeles gallery dedicated to generating dialogue via artistic representations and interpretations of the urban landscape.

This 2022 second-edition reissue by Rim Books, published on the occasion of the exhibition at Two Rooms gallery in Aotearoa New Zealand and featuring two extra plates, is now reproduced in duotone with a new foreword by Dr. Susan Ballard reflecting on the intervening years of changing climate, and new covers, hand-printed on a vintage Asbern letter-press by the artist in twenty distinct botanical iterations, with edition ranging from 14 – 30 copies each, all individually numbered and autographed by the artist. 

“A lot has happened in the intervening years. From 2007-2009 California was in drought, with the first ever state-wide proclamation of emergency. Not long after, 2011-2017 presented one of the longest recorded droughts in the United States: water restrictions were mandated, lawns were left unwatered and many millions of plants and trees died. The drought was accompanied by the very worst wildfires imaginable. Fanned by Diablo winds, the deadliest to human life and the most destructive was the November 2018 Camp fire in Butte County that destroyed the town of Paradise, killing 85 people, and scorching 153,336 acres of land. Unimaginable, and yet true. The hazards have not gone away. On the 22 September 2022 the Los Angeles Times reported that “California is so hot and dry that not even soaking rain can ease fall fire peril.”

In this context, Campbell’s LA Botanical remains a document of survival. LA Botanical is a contemporary herbal: a record of plants and their uses — edible, medicinal, weapon, stimulant, building material — sourced from the urban environment of a sprawling and luminous city. As such LA Botanical is a tool of awareness: eat this, drink this, sniff here, stroke there, listen, don’t touch. The series offers sensory and visible evidence of the Anthropocene: the new geological age where elemental planetary relationships are rendered unpredictable and deadly.”

From the foreword by Dr Susan Ballard.

Hand printed card-cover, perfect bound | 90 pages (duotone offset)
ISBN 978-1-99-116521-3
Publication: 15 December 2022

RRP $60

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Motutapu: Benjamin Work & Brendan Kitto

Motutapu
Benjamin Work & Brendan Kitto
Foreword by Zoe Black, essays by Pita Turei, Paul Johansson, Stan Wolfgramm and the artists
Designed by Shaun Naufahu and Giordano Zatta

Presented as an exhibition at Te Uru and as this publication, MOTUTAPU is the conclusion of a four-year journey by artist Benjamin Work and photographer Brendan Kitto. This project looks at the shared history of Motutapu (sacred island) throughout Moana Oceania – including Tongatapu, Rarotonga and at the entrance to the Waitematā Harbour here in Tāmaki Makaurau. Motutapu is a place of sanctuary. Positioned at the entrance of great harbours, straddling the open ocean and the mainland, it serves as a gateway for navigators arriving and departing on voyages. The lifting of tapu and making things noa took place on Motutapu, allowing navigators to continue with their journey back to their closest kāinga, even if it was generations later.

Work and Kitto’s inquiry into Motutapu was initially centred around the shared name. What soon became apparent was a deeper connection to their own hohoko/ʻakapapa (genealogy) as they travelled to three of the Motutapu locations and connected with key knowledge holders. Motutapu has become a metaphor for Work and Kitto as a starting point for these personal journeys. Through Work’s paintings and Kitto’s photographs of their journeys, combined with the introductions to the three Motutapu locations by Pita Turei, Paul Johansson and Stan Wolfgramm the book offers, for the extended diaspora of Moana Oceania, a way for reconnection and reconciliation and as a reminder of what joins communities across time and space.

“Motutapu reminds me of the Tongan practice of Tauhi vā (to nurture or maintain relational space), as a metaphor of this sacred in-between space, an island straddled between the deep moana and the fonua of the mainland . . . When Brendan and I first embarked on this journey we were unaware of where this would lead us, but we now know this was a journey of restoration, healing and connection – to moana, fonua and ultimately with ‘Otua.”

Benjamin Work

“. . . Pita Turei, Paul Johansson and Stan Wolfgramm, who generously offered to guide interactions with each island, . . . The stories imparted by each knowledge-holder were offered through worldviews that leave space for multiplicities of knowledge, championing shared understandings that centre the question ‘What do you know it to mean?’. Their collective research offers an appreciation of three locations that have immense importance personally, while respectfully leaving space for others to tell their stories of these lands.”

From the foreword by Zoe Black

RRP $70.00

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Card-cover, perfect bound | 176 pages (indigo 130gsm Satin Matt) Cover (270gsm Bagdad Brown) 203mm x 254mm portrait
Limited edition of 250
ISBN 978-1-99-116520-6
Publication: August 2022

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Motutapu: Benjamin Work & Brendan Kitto Book Launch, 2pm 6th August 2022, Te Uru.

Motutapu: Benjamin Work & Brendan Kitto Book Launch, 2pm 6th August 2022, Te Uru.

The exhibition MOTUTAPU, at Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery (11 June – 11 September 2022) will be completed by the launch of the book of the same title by Benjamin and Brendan, at 2pm, 6th of August at Te Uru, 420 Titirangi Road. All invited.

photo: Brendan kitto
photo: Brendan kitto
photo: Brendan kitto

Motutapu: Benjamin Work and Brendan Kitto.
With foreword by Zoe Black, essays by Pita Turei, Paul Johansson, Stan Wolfgramm and the artists. 176pp soft cover, 203mm x 254mm portrait, designed by Shaun Naufahu and Giordano Zatta and published by Rim Books. Limited first edition of 250 copies.

Closing Time: photographs from the Hotel Kiwi 1967 – 1975

Closing Time: photographs from the Hotel Kiwi 1967 – 1975
Gary Baigent, John Fields and Max Oettli
Featuring texts by Elizabeth Eastmond, Ted Spring and the photographers

This limited edition zine-style photobook feature the photographs made at the bars of Hotel Kiwi from the archives of three photographers, who have all, in their own way, contributed to the development of early contemporary art photography in New Zealand.

Hotel Kiwi was situated at the corner of Wellesley and Symonds Streets in Auckland – close to the University and the Elam School of Fine Arts. Described in The Pub-Goer’s Guidebook (1966) as “Built almost entirely of formica and rubberised floor tiles, with the whole place giving out a general lavatorial atmosphere, it surely represents all that a pub should not be . . . The only feature of the place that is at all remarkable – and the only reason for giving it a ½ an award are the barmen. They are possibly the best we encountered anywhere.”

Max Oettli found employment as a bartender at Hotel Kiwi after graduating from University of Auckland in the late 1960s. He carried his Leica camera on the job, photographing the varied patrons of the old and new, around the time ‘six o’clock swill’ was scrapped to more civilised 10pm closing. As well as the Hotel being the go-to student bar, artists and photographers – many associated with the art school – frequented the bar and are captured in this booklet. Max is joined by fellow ‘New Photographers’ Gary Baigent and John Fields, (a title coined by Athol McCredie in his exhibition, The New Photography at Te Papa), who photographed their friends and acquaintances at Hotel Kiwi at the time.

Together, they immortalise the punters, photographers, artists and poets as well as art dealers in action: Glenn Busch, Simon Buis, Allan Leatherby, Paul Gilbert, Garry Colebrook; Colin McCahon, Pat Hanly, Peter Eyley, Harry Wong; Sue Crockford and Rodney Kirk Smith, just to name a few.

This book also features texts by Elizabeth Eastmond, who lectured in the Art History department and Ted Spring, then a student at Elam recollecting their time spent at ‘the Kiwi’, in conjunction with field notes and recollections from the three photographers.

“Here, is the wisdom and failings of age, the impetuosity and rudeness of youth, all jammed into a room, thick with smoke and drumming with noise. Conversations are a spectrum in themselves ranging from worn clichés and small talk to nuclear physics, with plenty of spread thighs and cock jumbled in from both sexes.” From John Fields’ dairy, 21 February 1969.

Gary Baigent is a key figure in the emerging moment of contemporary New Zealand photography of the late 1960s. Born in Wakefield, Nelson, in 1941 he majored in painting at the Canterbury University School of Fine Arts, Christchurch from 1960 to 1962. Baigent began working on The Unseen City: 123 photographs of Auckland, a book on Auckland’s urban life, published in 1967, with its contrasty, grainy images shot on the streets, in backyards and pubs, on the wharves and in student flats. The book was polarising but it also helped stimulate a new style of photography.

John Fields (1938-2013) was born in Massachusetts, USA and was educated in Rockport, a New England artists’ colony. He learned to photograph while in the US Navy and became a commercial photographer in the early 1960s before working as a specialist in electron microscope imaging at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He emigrated to New Zealand in 1966 to continue working in this sphere at the University of Auckland. He also brought an expectation that photography was better recognised within the arts in his adopted country. To this end in 1970, he organised a cooperatively published booklet of the work of ten contemporary photographers, Photography: A visual dialect – the first such publication in New Zealand. He was also responsible for one of the first exhibitions of contemporary photography at a dealer gallery: a group exhibition at Barry Lett Galleries in 1972.

Max Oettli was born in Switzerland in 1947 and migrated to New Zealand with his family in 1956. He was brought up in Hamilton and was a trainee press photographer at the Waikato Times over university vacations from 1966 to 1969. He applied this experience to his work on the student newspaper Craccum while he studied English, history and art history at the University of Auckland. From 1970 to 1975 Oettli was a technical instructor in film and photography at the University of Auckland Elam School of Fine Arts. For some of this time, he was also the founding president of PhotoForum, a group advocating for and promoting expressive photography.

(Biographies are extracts from the Te Papa website)

RRP $40.00

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Soft-cover, saddle stitched | 56 pages (indigo uncoated 100gsm)
285x 210 mm | Limited edition of 150
ISBN 978-0-9951184-9-2
Publication: March 2022

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Jellicoe & Bledisloe

Jellicoe & Bledisloe
David Cook

When David Cook moved to Hamilton East, he was drawn to the colourful and creative lives of his neighbours. With camera in hand, he explored everything from front-yard mechanics to Sunday roasts, creating an intimate documentary of a State Housing suburb in the 1990s, moments before gentrification set in. In this energetic photobook, we look back twenty-five years to see burgeoning issues of relevance today: housing, bi-cultural relations, social welfare, and freshwater quality, all brought to us through the lens of daily life.

The title, Jellicoe & Bledisloe, is a reference to the local street names, commemorating New Zealand Governors General from the early twentieth century. Reflecting on this colonial heritage, Cook writes an engaging first-person account of the suburb, featuring a conversation with Ngaati Wairere historian Wiremu Puke. Together they unearth suppressed histories and rewrite our understanding of the Waikato landscape.

Te Papa Tongarewa holds a significant collection of photographs from this series. The work is also featured in an exhibition Jellicoe & Bledisloe: Hamilton in the 90s – David Cook at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery / Te Pūkenga Whakaata, Wellington (24 Feb – 15 May 2022).

David Cook’s photo-documentaries deal with communities in transition. Publications include Lake of Coal: the Disappearance of a Mining Township (finalist in the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards), Meet me in the Square: Christchurch 1983-1987 (winner of the 2015 MAPDA Exhibition Catalogue Award – major) and River Road: Journeys through Ecology.

David Cook interviewed by Lynn Freeman in Standing Room Only

RRP $50.00

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hardback | 108 pages
245 x 200 mm
ISBN 978-0-9951184-8-5
Publication: February 2022

Design: Sam Fraser and David Cook

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