Famous sport photographer has Gisborne connection

Peter Bush was the first photographer employed by The Gisborne Herald in 1960, who went on to become one of the country’s best known photojournalists. The mystery remains as to who took this photo of him in the main street in Gisborne.

Peter Bush was the first photographer employed by The Gisborne Herald in 1960, who went on to become one of the country’s best known photojournalists.

His extensive photography collection has been acquired by Te Manawa Museum and The Rugby Museum in Palmerston North where it will be sorted, digitised and archived by the museum.

Peter’s daughter, Rachel, who helped to pack up his Wellington studio, said going through his collection was akin to opening a time capsule with illustrations of the country’s major sporting and cultural events flashing before one’s eyes.

The collection includes 300,000 negatives, transparencies and prints.

Before starting at the Gisborne Herald Peter had spent a couple of years as public relations officer for the First Battalion New Zealand Regiment stationed in Malaya during the Malaya Emergency.

He started his photojournalism career as a cadet at the NZ Herald. Being low in the pecking order, he had to cover pictures for the shipping column, which he loved doing as it fed his imagination for overseas travel. He got talking to one of the ship’s captains and ended up working on a boat, after taking leave from the Herald. That whetted his appetite and he eventually found a boat that he could work his passage on and went to Europe and other exotic places. After wandering through Europe and North America for a year or so, he settled back in Wellington and then joined the battalion.

He suffered from repeated bouts of malaria when he returned and ended up in Gisborne Hospital, which is where he met his first wife, Glenis, who was a nurse at the hospital.

Peter is renowned as a rugby photographer and is as much a part of rugby in New Zealand as any of the players he has photographed.

His images are fundamental to the mana rugby holds in New Zealand society and his extensive portfolio of work appeals to a broad cross-section of age groups and ethnicities.

But equally, Peter’s career as a photojournalist has seen him capture many key social and cultural events, both in New Zealand and overseas.

His ability to not intrude but simply observe through the lens has seen him shoot thousands of important photojournalistic images — including many from New Zealand’s involvement in the Malaya Emergency during the 1950s.

Peter’s love for the outdoors saw him shoot scenery in remote places for the Weekly News and his work has been used in a number of non-fiction books depicting New Zealand’s natural landscapes. His work with the author Judith Holloway produced one of New Zealand’s first children’s travelogues, the classic 1970s book, High Summer on the Heaphy Track, recounting a family’s trials and tribulations on one of New Zealand’s Great Walks.

From the 1950s onwards, Peter worked as a photojournalist for a number of different newspapers, including the Auckland Star, New Zealand Herald, Truth and Sunday News.

He spent the latter half of his career as a freelance photographer. During his career, Peter was on hand to document many important events. For example, the sinking of the Wahine, the arrival of Cliff Richard, the Beatles, David Bowie, Eartha Kitt, and any number of other overseas VIPs; the 1981 Springbok tour, the rise and fall of political leaders, as well as ‘colourful’ personalities from the streets of Wellington.

Intertwined with the images of ‘big moments’ in New Zealand history is a chronology of more intimate photographs of Peter’s family, friends and their immediate living environments. These images provide a rare and personal insight into life in New Zealand from the 1950s right through to the early decades of the 2000s.

On January 11,2012 The New Zealand Herald said: “He has photographed Prime Ministers and protesters as well as prop forwards, travelled with the Pope (John Paul II) and taken shots as diverse as marooned, dying ships and golden sunsets. His genius has been the mix of aesthetic beauty, poignancy an dsheer unorthodoxy in his work. A Peter Bush photograph is never less than captivating.”