Art matters: Anarchist vision recalls city that no longer exists

Man and the Landscape; Parnell Rise, 1963, by Gary Baigent.

The tidal margins of the Waitemata are brilliant. Some may think it's best to live in a crib with views of endless white sand, but you're better off with mud.

Wading birds escort the outgoing tide while little black shags dry their wings on oyster-clad boatramps. A kotuku (white heron) visited the base of Meola Reef in autumn and the mullet are coming back in large shoals.

If you walk around the low coastal bluffs of Westmere towards the city you'll soon arrive at Coxs Bay and there you'll catch a glimpse of a couple of spidery and futuristic multi-hulls. There's often a rangy, white-haired fellow tweaking and tinkering with these long-limbed craft. That'll be Gary.

He has a smashing smile, though he can seem a little aloof as he swishes past, at the helm of one of his feather-light sailing machines.

Gary's unique boats refuse to conform to the usual rules of yacht design. He has written extensively on the subject while working at cutting-edge local boatyards, but he's also a pioneering photographer. Almost 50 years ago a coffee table book of black and white photos hit the shelves. Unseen City offered an intriguing and gritty perspective of 1960s Auckland captured by fiery young arts graduate Gary Baigent.

"We lived a pretty rough life then. We could work on the wharfs, in the railyard or the woolstore. We could get trucking jobs, but we were arty-farty," recalls the Nelson-born artist, writer and boat builder. "We were outsiders.

"I was a young punk then and it was an anarchist vision of the city."

Baigent would sometimes steady the camera on his hip, remaining incognito. His candid shots of parties and urban decay form a singular record of a city that had become accustomed to photographic flattery.

Baigent would print on "hard paper" to increase the contrast of energetic photographs captured while on the move.

He caught possibly the earliest graffiti condemning French nuclear testing and his streetscapes recall an Auckland that has long been demolished. His intimate shots of young men and women socialising in Newton and Ponsonby are precious and the book Unseen City is now a collectors' item, though it does lend its name to an exhibition curated by Robert Leonard which runs for a few more weeks at Titirangi's grand new institution, Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery. The show features a selection of Baigent's Unseen City images, complemented by a selection of early Robert Ellis drawings that led to his Motorway series of paintings.

In another room you can catch glimpses of Whatipu and Queen St in Rodney Charters' 1966 Film Exercise, which features what would now be scandalous footage of a barefoot young woman riding pillion on a motorcycle - with no helmet! Those were the days.

You can see Unseen City in beautiful black and white at Te Uru until August 16 before the show travels to Wellington's City Gallery later in the year.