Brian Brake: MAORI ART: The Photography of Brian Brake

Reviewed by PAUL PANCKHURST

Taken by one of New Zealand's greatest photographers, the late Brian Brake, these 95 photographs of traditional Maori art and ornaments are alive, pulsing and breathing.

Pounamu glows. The photographer extracts rich browns and ochres from the carved figures of meeting houses and pa gateways.

In an introductory essay, author Witi Ihimaera writes: "I believe that Brian saw what Maori saw: the living object, the wairua that all Maori know resides in wood, in greenstone, in whalebone, in bird feather."

Brake died in Auckland in 1988.

After leaving the National Film Unit, he worked in the 1950s and 1960s as a photographer for Magnum - the legendary agency - and for Life magazine, and won fame for Monsoon, his 1961 photo-essay shot in India.

His New Zealand work has starred in books such as Craft New Zealand, Art of the Pacific, Te Maori and the 1963 collaboration with writer Maurice Shadbolt, New Zealand: Gift of the Sea.

The new book is a mining of one seam of the work Brake left behind. The plates include photographs of amulets, canoes, caskets, clubs, doorway figures, feather boxes, fish hooks, flutes, godsticks, pendants, post figures and rock carvings.

The book was printed in China and the quality of the reproductions is high.

Many of the works will be familiar to Aucklanders from the Auckland War Memorial Museum's collection.

The only quibble is the sparse text: the objects and artworks are accompanied by label-style details - age, dimension, tribe, location, museum collection - but their stories are untold. Inspired readers will ferret elsewhere.

Publisher: Reed

Price: $49.95