Stunning images in Auckland Festival of Photography exhibition capture snapshots of history
Buttons, a 4-year-old cat burglar, with some of his loot. Photo / Michael Craig
A prolific “cat burglar” exposed as an undie thief is caught in flight above a pile of laundry loot in photographer Michael Craig’s portrait of Buttons, a 4-year-old tonkinese cat.
The eye-catching image is one of 24 photographs featured in an exhibition showcasing work by NZ Herald visual journalists, opening next week at the Auckland Festival of Photography.
Shot across the North Island from Waitangi to Tongariro National Park, they capture snapshots of history: a fiery protest by striking nurses, Metallica’s sold-out concert at Eden Park, the aftermath of the Mount Maunganui landslide, a barn owl in flight.
The collection also dips into Antarctica, through Mike Scott’s striking picture of a man dwarfed by a sheer glacier in the Taylor Valley – taken in 2022 during then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s visit to mark the 65th anniversary of Scott Base.
On display from May 27 to June 21 at Auckland’s Queens Wharf, the photographs reflect this year’s theme, Movement (Kori), which will be explored through a mix of exhibitions and public events.
“To photograph movement is to acknowledge nothing stands still – that light shifts, people migrate, animals traverse, that the Earth itself is in constant motion,” says Julia Durkin, who founded the festival in 2004.
“The still image becomes paradoxical: a pause within motion, a fragment of time that continues to move within us.”
International exhibitions include a colourful series by photojournalist Shen Chao-Liang documenting the “transformer-style” mobile stage trucks that travel across Taiwan.
Japanese photographer Mayumi Suzuki’s eight-year project, The Tide’s Gift, weaves together the past, present and future of her hometown, Onagawa, which was wiped out by a tsunami in 2011.
On May 31, Chao-Liang, Hideko Kataoka of Newsweek Japan, Polish curator Grzegorz Dabrowski and NZ Herald visual journalist Jason Dorday will take part in Talking Culture, a panel discussion on photojournalism and documentary photography.
The festival also hosts the Aotearoa Music Photography Awards. Online voting for the People’s Choice Award is open through the website (festival.org.nz) until May 29.
See Canvas magazine for artist Linda Gilbert’s memories of her brother, the late photographer Paul Gilbert, and the exhibition she has curated from his Road People series on the 70s house-truck movement.