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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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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Exhibition and book

Jellicoe & Bledisloe: Hamilton in the 90s – David Cook

  • Wednesday, 23 February 2022 10:00 am – Sunday, 15 May 2022 11:00 am
  • New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te Pūkenga Whakaata Shed 11, 60 Lady Elizabeth Lane Wellington New Zealand (map)

When photographer David Cook moved into Hamilton East, he was drawn to the colourful, creative and chaotic lives of his neighbours. With camera in hand, he explored back-yard mechanics to Sunday roasts, inventing an intimate documentary of a State Housing suburb in the 90s, moments before gentrification set in.

Books will be available from this site from February 25th.

The New Zealand Portrait Gallery opening.

A Sun Dance In Sandringham

A Sun Dance in Sandringham: 43 Photographs
Solomon Mortimer

“In December of 1991, I was born in what would be my bedroom for the following two decades. It was a solid brick and timber 1940’s state house with only one previous owner, a couple called Alf and May Coppell.

My parents had purchased the house in 1989 after May had passed away. Years later while studying photography I discovered the classic Marti Friedlander image of ‘Alf and May Coppell, 1969,’ standing in front of my bedroom to be, and it is firmly located in the heart of Sandringham.

By 2011, so much had changed in the 20 years I had lived on Kiwitea Street. Many houses had undergone renovation and the shops had mostly changed owners two or three times. Each time shifting the cultural landscape of the neighbourhood, from predominantly English, to Chinese and Korean, to inarguably Indian.

I remember on the way home from primary school I would get a custard square at the Pidgeon Bakery and look into the mechanics workshop across the road, wondering at the way the light would get stuck on the greasy bench that followed the back wall under a bank of windows.

Then I would finish the walk home with tacky fingers, gummed up from excess icing and wash them under the garden tap before going inside to greet my parents.

The 43 plates on the following pages were all recorded on the streets of Sandringham in 2011 – 2012 while I went for my afternoon skateboard around the block. Covering the network of roads from Fowlds Avenue over to Dominion Road and Mount Albert Road up to Balmoral / Saint Lukes Road”.
Solomon Mortimer, 2019

Published by Solomon Mortimer with the support of PhotoForum, February 2019
Designed by Solomon Mortimer
Designated as PhotoForum #90
Printed by Momento Pro
210 x 150 mm  First edition of 200
ISS 0111-0411

RRP $40

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New Zealand By The Way

New Zealand By The Way: Immigrant Photographers & Photographs of Immigrants
Original photo essays by Arno Gasteiger, Jenner Zimmermann, Haruhiko Sameshima, Glenn Jowitt, Gil Hanly, Greg Semu

Published by Jenner Zimmermann and AGFA 1996

Here is an oldie – but this book still holds interest for the new audience in 2021. Back in the day when Agfa-Gevaert held a large share in consumer and professional photography products, German-born New Zealand based photographer Jenner Zimmermann struck up a very generous sponsorship deal from the corporation to invite six photographers, a designer and pay for the production of a luscious, large-format hard-cover book of photography about New Zealand.

He chose three New Zealand born photographers to photograph the immigrants- and three immigrant photographers working in New Zealand to photograph their new home.

The photographers armed with the copious free supply of Agfa films (they did not have to use Agfa – could have used the normal film of their choice.) went about to produce a new project, without any constraints by the commercial objectives – their approaches and the results were as diverse as the population in New Zealand then and now.



275 x 300 mm, 128 pages, 127 colour and b/w photographs.
ISBN 0-473-03631-2 (Hard Cover)

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Quiet Chaos

Quiet Chaos
Tony Nyberg

A collection of images taken while travelling through Japan in 2017. Published by Back Space Books.

Uncannily intimate observation by the traveller photographer in Japan, where the noisome mysteries of old and new are transformed into the contemplative visual harmony of B&W and colour photographs. A little gem, a book as a loveletter to getting lost in Tokyo, Kyoto and Naoshima.








$40

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softback saddle-stiched | 56 pages
148 x 210 mm
2018 Back Space Books

ENTOURAGE: aka Physical Distance Theory, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Videogames

by Tim J. Veling

Self-published artist book from Otautahi Christchurch. Available from Rim Books in limited quantity.

Author of Red Bus Diary (2006), Veling began photographing his home city of Christchurch well before the 2010-11 quakes changed the CBD forever. Since then, for the full decade, he has amassed passionate and personal observations of the transformation and rebuild, publishing many photobooks and portfolios via www.placeintime.org, a multi-platform project facilitating and promoting documentary work about Christchurch and a cross-section of its people. Place … Continue reading