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Jane Ussher was the chief photographer for the New Zealand Listener for 29 years. It was the role that defined her celebrated career; she has been a key player in documenting New Zealand culture through images and is widely considered one of the country’s best portrait photographers. Now freelance, she has created and curated a series of political portraits for the Listener in the lead-up to the 2023 general election.
Ussher, alongside New Zealand Listener art director Derek Ward, went into the series first and foremost wanting the leaders of the five leading political parties to look unguarded, relaxed, and spontaneous. “That was the driving force – the thing that was most important for me to achieve in all of the portraits,” she says.
Since this shoot had to be rescheduled, how did the Prime Minister approach the day when you were finally able to meet up?
Chris’ daughter was sick on the day we were doing these photos in Parliament. Derek managed to find a really beautiful historic house on Ponsonby Road [Auckland], which again lent itself to a really great background, and I was really happy with that.
It was actually a great day. This was a week or two after his child was sick, and it was the day after his birthday when he’d had a really great day at a primary school where kids had given him birthday cake. So, he arrived at the shoot in a very relaxed frame of mind.
That’s impressive that it’s so consistent with the other photos, being in a different city.
Yes, Derek worked really hard to find something that he thought would fit in with the series. I could not have been happier.
Did you move around different spaces in the house when shooting with Chris?
No, because we had only 15 minutes. He was on a really tight time frame. Because I’d photographed him twice recently, though, for quite prolonged periods, he was really relaxed, and I’m not sure I would’ve gotten to that point as quickly with the other politicians who I didn’t know as well. Certainly, with Chris, that 15 minutes was long enough to achieve the result I was looking for and I never felt my time with him was compromised.
I understand that for this series you wanted a real depiction of who the subject is as a person, rather than as a politician?
Well, I don’t know that you ever get that. But I didn’t want it to look like a photo from a press release – I wanted it to feel a lot less formal. My aim was for them to feel so relaxed in front of the camera that they weren’t presenting themselves as a political persona.
