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Profile |
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Bruce ConnewNew Zealand, b. 1949 |
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Raised in Panmure, then a new working-class suburb of Auckland, Connew began photographing his extended family with a ferrania Duplex Z2 Italian box camera, later using it to document the Queen of England and Duke of Edinburgh while on their 1963 visit to New Zealand. He studied photography briefly at the West Surrey College of Art and Design, Guildford, England before his first documentary report in 1976 on a dishevelled and dispirited Aboriginal community in northwest Australia. They were victims of Australia's failed Aboriginal assimilation policy. The situation was “tragic, heartbreaking”. Many of the 500 Aboriginals were alcoholic, and over 90% had syphilis amongst other medical and social ills. It remains part of a nightmare from which Aboriginals are yet to stir. |
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While a contract photographer for the New Zealand Listener magazine which had published the Aboriginal story, Connew photographed in New Caledonia late 1984 during a period of strife between the French and indigenous Melanesian Kanaks. He photographed in Eloi Machoro’s rebel encampment near Thio. Two weeks later Machoro, a teacher, was shot in the back and killed by gendarmes. New Caledonia is New Zealand’s closest Pacific neighbour, yet most New Zealanders at the time knew little of the troubled country beyond Noumea’s Club Med. |
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The racially selected South African rugby team toured New Zealand in 1981. It was an unpleasant time. The pilot of a small plane, in protest at apartheid and the rugby tour, buzzed the Hamilton grounds where the first match was to be played and threatened to fly his aircraft into the grandstand. This frightening act brought about the abandonment of the game that in turn lead to appalling violence in the streets aimed at anti-tour protesters. The tour continued with the support of the New Zealand government, escalating violence between a large, organised police force and the equally organised protesters, ending with the final match of the tour played on the anniversary of Steve Biko’s death. How no one was killed that day is still a mystery. Once again a small plane buzzed Auckland’s Eden Park dropping many flour bombs onto the ground where the Springboks played the All Blacks. Photographers throughout New Zealand, including many never heard of before and never heard of again, came out to photograph New Zealand’s shame. |
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The strength of the anti-apartheid movement in New Zealand twice encouraged Connew to South Africa. He arrived on the day the South African government declared an emergency in 1985. This report was to coincide with an All Black rugby tour of South Africa, never to see the rugby, always looking on the other side of the fence in the towns and cities where the rugby was to take place. To New Zealand’s great credit, the tour was cancelled after a court case in New Zealand judged that the tour would bring the game of rugby into disrepute. Connew’s tour around apartheid went ahead to become a book, South Africa, introduced by Winnie Mandala, a short film and a New Zealand touring exhibition. On his return to New Zealand, Connew set off to photograph underground coal miners in Buller and on the West Coast where his father was raised and his grandfather had been president of a miners’ union for many years. The five-month project immediately preceded New Zealand’s headlong dash into a rabid money economy that altered the State-run mines forever. The essay became a New Zealand touring exhibition, Beyond the Pale. In an effort to clear the fog of madness brought about by the death of his wife in a car crash two years before, Connew descended upon a small, long-running war in Burma, in 1989, between the Karen ethnic minority and the Burmese military. The book that resulted, On the way to an ambush, uses photographs, text, letters and memorabilia to confront the capriciousness of death, parallel worlds and what truly motivates a photojournalist, all this while on a journey through the Burmese jungle with a New Zealand mercenary and his band of raiders to lay an ambush. Connew returned to South Africa in 1994 for the country’s first democratic elections. Along with myriad other photographers, he recorded Nelson Mandala historically casting his first, free vote. Afterwards, Connew spent time in the Cape Town squatter camps looking at the reality of life for blacks on the cusp of freedom. This report became a New Zealand touring exhibition and catalogue, Suburbs. New Zealand wine making, and much earlier the country’s now defunct kauri gum industry, grew from the sweat of Balkan immigrants. With that in mind, Connew travelled to Kosovo in June 1999, entering the war-ravaged land seven days after Nato troops. It was the beginning of the return of the Kosovar/Albanian refugees. The title of Connew’s essay from this time, Press Escape to Cancel, is a repeating line from one of Jabir Derala’s love poems. Jabir Derala is a contemporary Balkan poet, journalist and writer. Press Escape to Cancel weaves an anti-war metaphor with photographs from the madness of immediate post-war Kosovo and others from the clinical madness of a Kosovo asylum. In May 2000, when the latest Fiji coup brought down the Indian-Fijian lead government, Connew’s two elder daughters in New Zealand both had Fijian partners — one an indigenous Fijian in New Zealand on a scholarship and the other an Indian-Fijian here because his parents had left Fiji after the last coup. Around the dinner table before the coup, they had both spoken of Fiji, describing it as if it were two different countries. Connew flew in keen to look for himself at the core of Fiji tradition and culture at the funeral of a paramount chief, and then travel to the Indian-Fijian cane fields in the west of Viti Levu, Fiji’s main island. Their story of immigration over a century ago to work as indentured labourers in the sugar cane fields and now as emigrants to escape eternal second-class citizenship (they cannot own land in Fiji) has pulled Connew back six times to one valley north of Nadi and the extended family that ekes out a living harvesting its annual sugar cane crop. A book is in preparation. |
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For six days in November 2001, Connew, with Maori beneficial owner, Dean Tiemi Te Au, took a launch around some of the muttonbird islands in the deep south of New Zealand. They were in search of the vast flocks of migratory muttonbirds arriving from the edges of the Arctic Circle and fishing at sea that Dean had described months earlier. Along with numerous smaller groups, they came across two flocks numbering tens, if not hundreds of thousands of birds. Each time, the spectacle was out of this world. Females lay one egg in the same burrow every year in the dark, peat soils of the muttonbird islands. An astonishing thought given the distance of their journey. They were hopeless at landing, Dean said, crashing through the canopy and thumping to the ground. He stood up during one conversation and held his arms out like wings and gently shook his narrow frame to show how the birds recovered for several minutes before waddling off to their burrows. He said over twenty million of them arrived in New Zealand each year and explained that his entry to muttonbirding had not been straightforward, but that’s his story to tell. The following year Dean invited Connew to Taukihepa, one of the muttonbird islands, to photograph him and two of his sons, Dean and younger brother Tiemi, muttonbirding on Heretatua at the northern end of the island. They had been on the island two weeks when Connew arrived with his wife, Catherine. Their stay was brief. It turned out, according to the Muttonbird Regulations, that Connew and his wife should not have been there and Dean was prosecuted by the Department of Conservation and recently fined $100. The politics of the region is mystifying. The exhibition, Muttonbirds — part of a story, represents the symbiosis between man and bird, the symmetry of existence, while Dean’s text in the artist’s book of the same title tells a tale of redemption, part of an elaborate and sometimes unfortunate story. BRUCE CONNEW (New Zealand, b.1949) is a social and political documentary photographer who “has always been a celebrant of human resistance in tight places . . . a lone ranger all—seeing conscience on the world stage, laying bare hard truths in distant countries” — Justin Paton, Landfall 198. The ideas and metaphors in his essays, series, exhibitions and books — the meanings behind what he has seen — have been found in New Zealand amongst underground coalminers and Maori muttonbirders, amid apartheid in South Africa, the immediate post—war madness of Kosovo, the colonial complications of New Caledonia, Australia and most recently, Fiji. His book, On the way to an ambush (Victoria University Press, 1999), dealt with the death of his first wife placed alongside a small ethnic war in Burma, and has attracted much attention. In August 2007, Victoria University Press and University of Hawai’i Press jointly published, Stopover, a look at migration as it has affected Indian—Fijians who first came to Fiji as indentured labourers in 1879. Stopover opened as an exhibition on August 26, 2007, at Pataka Gallery, Porirua, Wellington, New Zealand. This work screened at the 2005 Visa Pour l’Image photography festival, Perpignan, France. Connew’s images are in numerous public and private collections in New Zealand, and have been exhibited widely. His latest work, I Saw You, the surveillance series, was an exhibition, book and short film launched at Mary Newton Gallery, July 17, 2007. It is the first of a series of three exhibition/book projects, the next due mid- to late-2008. Exhibitions (solo) 2007 Stopover Pataka Gallery, Porirua, Wellington
Exhibitions (group) 2006-2007 Wonder-land Fotografia Festival Internazionale di Roma, Rome; Pingyao International Photography Festival, China; Auckland Festival AK07
Books (solo, selected) 2007 I Saw You Vapour Momenta Books, Wellington
Books (group, selected) 2006 Into the Light, a History of NZ Photography Craig Potton Publishing
Articles (selected) 2008 Unguarded Moments Michael Fitzgerald, EDIT 45, Germany
Films (selected) 2002 Visible Evidence a film on eight photographers, Leon Narbey (TVNZ), NZ
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© Bruce Connew 2004