The view from my window: Fiona Clark on overcoming censorship

Photographer Fiona Clark.

Fiona Clark is one of Aotearoa's most notable photographers but, thanks to the repressive environment of 1970s New Zealand, her career was almost stubbed out before it began. Four decades later, she is the subject of a film, Fiona Clark: Unafraid, recounts how the photographer overcame censorship, homophobia, sexism and debilitating physical injuries to become one of our most respected social documentarians. As told to Joanna Mathers.

I live in Tikorangi, a small rural community in northern Taranaki. It's like the American Midwest: cattle, flare sticks burning off the excess gas created after fracking.

I'm sitting in the front part of the old milk factory where I live. The road outside is raised, and traffic goes past at about the height of my head. I can see an old pipe and concrete fence, which is original and dates to the 1920s.

The big fracking cranes go past between 8am-9am. My home is on an inland road, the main access road for a fracking site. New Zealand's fossil fuel industry lives here, and I've campaigned against it for a very long time. Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a climate crime scene.

Three huge trucks just drove by, carrying loads of chemicals to the fracking site. After they frack, they light the flares. At night these make the night sky flicker. It's an extremely unusual landscape.

Sometimes the flares generate black smoke, which can end up in our rainwater. Generally, people just hunker down and tolerate what is happening. We know that we are seeing the death of an industry, and we will outlive it.

There's bush on three sides of this property, and my garden is on the fourth side. In total I have 2.8ha, some is bush that I have planted and is now regenerating.

I've lived here for 45 years, and the process of regeneration has been very organic. It's not a fast process. I watch things grow. When I look outside, I can see second-generation kōwhai and a dotting of cows in the distance.

I moved to Auckland from Inglewood, which is close to where I live now, in the summer of 1971. I didn't like living in a cold climate, so I went north, to Elam. It was very progressive, the early gay liberation movement was located there. I was in the sculpture department and this was the centre of it all.

My older brother had been involved in Vietnam War protests and I was political, so were my parents, but in a quiet way, being farmers in a conservative community.

You could say 1971 was New Zealand's summer of love. I lived in Ponsonby and would walk to Western Springs to see the international bands – Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin. I was also going to many gay dance parties, and taking photos of my friends.

I decided to switch from sculpture to photography at some stage and had to present a set of images for an assessment. They were images of my friends from the gay liberation movement, at parties, dressed up "outrageously" (as people thought at the time).

My friends wrote on the images, which were then hung on the wall of the art school.

One of the images was graffitied by another student. It was a photo that had been taken at the Occidental Tavern on Vulcan Lane. This was a safe place for many people who weren't accepted by mainstream society–gang members, the trans community.

The image was a close of up people's hands, one of whom was a gang member, called "Sparky". He'd written "the hand that shakes the power" on the image, which I thought was quite something. But a student crossed this out and wrote "dick". It seemed pathetic to me.

Two of these images were chosen to be part of an exhibition of contemporary New Zealand photography called The Active Eye. It would end up closing the Auckland Art Gallery.

The exhibition was set to open in March 1976, but Patricia Bartlett saw my images and laid an "indecency" complaint with the police. The pictures were taken out of their frames and placed in the gallery director's chair for the police to view. But the director wasn't there and, after the police viewed them, they were taken by someone. No one has admitted anything but they just vanished and have never been seen again.

The image was of my friends posing. One of them had written something like, "We can f*** anyone we want." Anyway, the exhibition was closed and the other photographers were grumpy that my work had closed it.

I eventually moved back to Taranaki, and brought this old milk factory as a home studio and art space. It was the first factory built after the land confiscation of 1863; there are remnants of the factory, and the old cottage is still here. I don't feel that there is a bad energy here, but I am aware of its history as confiscated land.

Someone I know told me that their grandmother had put survey pegs in the ground in one of the paddocks I look out over, in an attempt to stop the confiscation. The pegs aren't there anymore but I think of this when I look out.

I feel that if you look at something properly, you can recognise its importance. I think that's what I've always done … recognised what is in front of me.

Fiona Clark: Unafraid, directed by Lula Cucchiara, premiered at the NZIFF and is now at cinemas nationwide.