KEY POINTS:
The diversity and splendour of Unesco's World Heritage sites are to be captured in an ambitious photographic project driven by a New Zealand company.
There are 830 sites with World Heritage status of which New Zealand has three: the New Zealand sub-Antarctic islands, Tongariro National Park and Te Wahipounamu (South Island's southwest area.) Others around the world range from the medieval city centres of Morocco to 16th-century ironwork towns in Germany and a centuries-old salt mine in Poland.
New Zealand company, Our Place Publishing Ltd, will, in conjunction with other publishers around the world, produce an initial series of 10 books of photographs, followed by television material. The ambitious project could take decades.
Its instigator was Aucklander Geoff Steven, who had just left his position at TVNZ as head of commissioned programmes.
"I had been the king of the transient medium and I was looking for a project with more permanence ... one that had a global perspective." He stumbled across the World Heritage sites on the internet. "I saw that these sites were the most significant places on earth - and as a photographer I thought - I just want to be able to spend my time photographing them from now on. I realised that although these sites had often been photographed individually, no one had ever undertaken the colossal project of bringing them all together into one photographic collection."
Steven approached Unesco World Heritage Centre and after 10 months of negotiating the world body gave its official partnership status to the New Zealand company, formed by Steven and Paul Bateman of David Bateman Ltd, an Auckland publishing company which specialises in large co-productions with international publishing partners.
Four New Zealand photographers are part of a worldwide team with former Herald photographer Amos Chapple, who took the photograph above, its youngest member. The collection resulting from the project will form a database, part of the profits from which will go back to a Unesco education fund and into the maintenance of the individual sites.
