Family snapshots reveal Raw power

Birthday Party for Grandma Raw, 1963. Photo / Supplied

A black and white photo by Bob Raw in the Corban Estate Arts Centre gallery shows a young mother asleep on the couch, her son crashed out on top of her, covered by a handknitted blanket. The caption on the wall simply says: "June Raw (nee Gordon) and Ian, Golf Road, New Lynn, 1961."

Nearby is a photo of a little boy from the same family, cuddled up to his toy: "Robbie with home-made Teddy, Golf Rd, New Lynn, 1959." "Ian's haircut, Golf Rd, New Lynn, 1963" is of Ian, the sleeping child from the first photo, a couple of years later, grimacing as his laughing mother administers a severe short-back-and-sides.

Along the next wall is a series of photos showing the Raw family around the cake-laden kitchen table for events like "Birthday party for Grandma Raw", "Birthday party with cat", "Mum cooking tea, taken by surprise", "Christmas" and "Birthday party with Bob", while the pictures on the other side of the gallery reflect backyard and church gala activities from the 60s.

The prevailing mood is the cheery domesticity of a closeknit family. One shot called "More Food!" - the captions written by Bob on the back of the photos - shows "Mum" dishing out eight plates of dinner on the kitchen bench. The meal is a no-frills trilogy of spuds, peas and chops.

Love and Food is the first exhibition of photos by Raw, who died three years ago at the age of 76. When he was 12, in 1942, his family moved to a house in Golf Rd, New Lynn, where he lived for nearly 50 years. Raw was an engineer by trade, and a self-taught photographer who started taking pictures when he was a teenager. When he married June Gordon and they had children - Linda, Dianne, Robert, Ian and Anne - his family became his subjects, captured on what eventually amounted to hundreds of rolls of negatives.

There is nothing fancy in these charming, natural images. But they are evocative of a time when family bonds were strong, and connection with a community mattered.

The idea for the exhibition, curated by Unitec Bachelor of Design co-ordinator and photographer Allan McDonald and Robyn Mason, local history collections adviser with Waitakere Library, first started when McDonald met Bob Raw about 10 years ago when he was researching a social history project on New Lynn.

"There weren't a lot of photos - it was very much a working-class area and there would not have been the discretionary dollars to make a lot of photos," he says. "I came across this work during that project. I made contact with the family and was amazed by this wealth of material.

"There are lots of people who had small personal collections of photos of their own family and Bob's is very much a personal collection - but it was immense. So I thought this can go beyond the New Lynn project. I sat down with Bob and went through the collection. He and June were both very hospitable people. A community ethos was very much a part of their daily life."

Mason says she and McDonald "had to develop trust with June" when they went to see her to discuss the donation of Bob's negatives to the library. She agreed to hand over a large proportion of the negatives, which have been conserved by the National Library. She still keeps some pictures for her own enjoyment in what is now known as "The Collection of Mrs June Raw".

McDonald made prints from selected negatives for the show, pointing out he had a hard time finding the right paper, so rarely used in these days of digital imagery. They were unable to find the negs for the show's smaller "vintage" prints - otherwise known as originals.

About a dozen members of the Raw family attended the opening of the exhibition. "The Raw family didn't realise how amazing these images were," says McDonald.

Adds Mason: "Anne, one of the daughters, came to the opening and she said her dad had been taking pictures her whole life and it wasn't until she got the invitation and looked at it [with the image of her mother asleep] and first thought, 'Oh, that's just Mum and Ian.' Then she said, 'Ooh, that's kind of art, isn't it?"'

McDonald says he has had warm comments about the exhibition from professional photographers. "Even though his photographic background wasn't informed by any sort of learning or camera club or any sort of institutional body, he had this native eye, an intuitive ability, and photographers recognise this.

"Some of the general public don't understand why you'd put up family photographs - they seem so intimate and personal, so why would they be of any great interest? But if you spend some time here, they start to work on you ... Mrs Raw was quite a stunning woman and she has a very mobile face, you can tell her moods - not all of these images are situations where she's feeling sweet, sometimes you can feel some tension. To me, that's what lifts the images away from sentimental family snapshots. There is a range of emotional experience ..."

"... and an incredibly strong sense of narrative," adds Mason. "It lifts something which is quite mundane and ordinary and he had such an eye and such wit."

Look no further than "Mow and rake - June and Emily do the lawns, 1967", a laugh-out-loud photo of Raw's wife mowing the lawns at Golf Rd, followed by Raw's elderly mother - who lived with them for 17 years - wielding a rake.

Another photo shows the family at the table, June's eyes looking annoyed. "We talked about that," laughs Mason. "June said sometimes it took Bob a long time to get the right shot and they had to sit there while the food got cold."


We used to have such a lot of fun

June Raw, who no longer lives in the Golf Rd house in which she and her husband raised their family, says it has always been "a family favourite thing" to go through the boxes of Bob's photos. "On a wet day, we'd dig out the photos and go through them, so I have seen them a number of times over the years. I must admit some of the ones Allan unearthed, I'd forgotten about, like the one he's used as the sort of logo.

"At the opening, somebody said to us, 'Do you feel as though you've been exposed?' We all said no - we remembered the photos from all through our life and we felt it was a lovely memorial to Bob."

June says she and Bob shared an enthusiasm for photography from the days when they were teenagers.

"There was Bob and I and a girlfriend of mine - we were all interested and we three in the weekend would get together and develop and print our own photos. We used to have such a lot of fun.

"There's a crazy story which I told at the opening. Bob was about 13, he was in his mum's laundry with two old concrete tubs and a copper. In one tub you'd put the tray for the developer and the other tub you'd have the fixer. To do all this you had a red light so you could see what you were doing.

"Bob was working away there, and suddenly the wooden lid on the copper started to wiggle and rattle and then a big tentacle came out, then another one and a large claw. Bob rushed to the light switch - and ruined his photos - and here's this enormous great crayfish coming out. Someone had thrown it in the copper on top of his mum's washing."

She says she has received many comments about the exhibition.

"I'm getting that people can relate to it, if they can remember back that far - and younger people are fascinated by things like a family sitting around a table eating together. Now people eat in front of the TV."

Exhibition

What: Love and Food: The Family Photographs of Bob Raw
Where and when: Corban Estate Arts Centre, 426 Great North Rd, Henderson, to June 21