Documentary Photographer Robin Morrison’s Long Road Trip Through The South Island

Documentary photographer Robin Morrison (1944-1993) is known for his portrayal of the New Zealand countryside, everyday life and vernacular architecture.

In 1979 he spent six months photographing the far corners of the South Island, offering what he called an alternate view on the usually picturesque images of its mighty mountains and glacial rivers. Morrison’s incredible images formed the book The South Island of New Zealand From the Road, which was published in 1981.

For the book, Morrison covered 18,000 miles (28,968km), from Golden Bay in the north to Riverton Bowling Club near Bluff, capturing landscapes and domestic scenes, rugged mining shacks, bowling clubs, art deco houses and the people who call them home.

The South Island of New Zealand From the Road, with its full-page images, quality printing and paper stock, became the first photography book to win a New Zealand Book Award in 1982. The book has now been reprinted in a new edition by Massey University Press, with an essay on the book’s legacy from Louise Callan (a journalist and friend of Robin Morrison).

The book’s launch coincides with the opening of Road Trip, a new exhibition at Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira, which presents a selection of images from the book along with details about how they were captured. It’s been called a seminal piece of photographic history, and now’s your chance to view it.

To celebrate, Viva has an extract from the new edition, part of a major essay on the book’s legacy written by Louise Callan. Read it below.

The South Island of New Zealand From the Road broke new ground. It still stands out. First for the production — huge, glossy board covers, the dimensions following the 35mm format of the images inside; the full-page photographs given space, uninterrupted by text; and the quality of the paper and of the printing.

Then there were the photographs themselves. Photographer Alistair Guthrie remembers the book being published at the same time that he was starting to take the medium seriously. He was looking at the work of the new colour photographers in America: ‘Folks like Steve Shaw and Joel Meyerowitz and William Eggleston. I remember getting a book about the same time as Robin’s called The New Colour Photography by Sally Eauclaire. I couldn’t read it — the words were so long you almost needed a dictionary beside you — but I was taken by the imagery. It was photographs of the everyday, which resonated for some reason. Whether it had people in it or not didn’t seem to matter. And then Robin’s book came out and, “Oh god, we’re doing it in New Zealand!” That’s how I saw it at the time, and probably still see it.

‘You don’t have to break any rules. It was that factual “here it is” aesthetic that carried things through. It was stripped back but it had a style to it that I found quite illuminating, especially in New Zealand at the time, because I hadn’t seen anything like that coming out of this country. And then here you have this big, beautiful book: colour, open the page, and there it was — a house, on the side of the road, great sky behind it. Everything about it was right, everything was composed, was quite stark.

Laurence Aberhart thinks From the Road had the biggest impact of any photographic book ever published in this country in terms of people buying and embracing it. There had been the Brian Brake and Maurice Shadbolt book, New Zealand: Gift of the Sea, published in 1963, but From the Road seemed to touch a public consciousness ‘because what you were seeing was, in inverted commas, the real New Zealand, and not many people were doing that. Robin really understood the broad spectrum of what he was trying to do — he made a book that appealed to everyone, from the art world to the people seeing a nice view of New Zealand.’

Not everyone loved the book. Book retailers reportedly hated its size, which made it difficult to shelve and display among more traditional formats. Some reviewers, assessing it in later years in the context of his body of work, missed the grittiness and harder edge of some other local photographers — it was a little too comfortable, a bit middle-class. There were those in the South who criticised the choice of images. Where were the more affluent places (and people)? Still others thought they were being made fun of.

When Robin himself was asked, he responded, ‘I’m not really doing that, but I like to laugh at ourselves, and I include myself because I’m a New Zealander. What I’m showing is not different from what we are. It is us. It’s how we look, how we go about our business, how we go to the races, go to Anzac Day, where we live. ‘It’s done with a lot of love. I love the South Island. I have a great regard for the people and a great regard for what they do. They’re very interesting people. It’s a very interesting countryside.’

‘The South Island of New Zealand From the Road’ by Robin Morrison with an introduction by Louise Callan, $75 (Massey University Press). The book’s launch coincides with the opening of ‘Road Trip’, a new exhibition at Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira, on now.