Check out some of my recent work, and my essays on Photographing The Arts!
It's actually kinda hard to date these images from 2002, because they're on FILM - and unlike those fancy digital cameras, they don't have data in the file to tell me what day & time they were taken! But this was the day I got the film scanned and saw the results, so I think we're close...
Read MoreContinuing from yesterday's rehearsal photos, here are a few images of Mahinarangi Tocker's 2004 concerts in the Festival Club / Pacific Crystal Palace tent - I went back the following day to photograph the school's performance in the afternoon, then again in the evening to enjoy the show myself. These are a mix of both shows - two from the afternoon, three from the evening - and the second one was cropped, clearcut and used as the cover of her album the following year, The Mongrel In Me.
Read More"Has it really been...ten...years?"
I remember going back to my high school reunion in Canada, and hearing the disbelief in the headmaster's voice as he looked at all of us, and it sank in just how much time had passed since this particular bunch had graduated.
Read MoreA mix of boxing, Shakespeare and dance, today - first a 2006 show, Aarero Stone, featuring Carol Brown and Charles Koroneho at Soundings Theatre in Te Papa. I actually photographed this one over a couple of days' rehearsals as it came together towards opening night - which often happens - but it still stands out in my head for the images that came out of it, this many years later.
Read MoreFour different shows today - first up is Super Vision, with Harry Sinclair from the Front Lawn. To be honest, when I heard he was in Wellington doing a show at the same time Don McGlashan was playing at the Festival Club, I kinda hoped...well, you know. Never happened, though!
Read MoreThree shows today - well, actually, four really! From 2004 we've got both Gilberto Gil at the Events Centre, and a late-night set at the Festival Club (but I'm not sure who the band was that night, I was flying past on my way to the car ten years ago!).
Read MoreTwo shows from the same year (and the same day), today - plus a bonus photo of lovely Vi Blackburn, who has been ushering and selling programmes around Wellington for as long as anyone can remember. This is possibly the first photo I got of her in action, but I always tried to track her down at some point during each Festival.
Read MoreBelgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's work had been to New Zealand before, with works like Iets Op Bach and Foi appearing at the Festival previously, but I think Sutra was the first to appear under his own name rather than as part of Les Ballets C de la B. (Happy to be proven wrong of course, but that's how I remember it!)
Read MoreA few different events today - a glimpse of the huge outdoor exhibition that opened Waitangi Park in 2006, Yann-Arthus Bertrand's photo series The Earth From Above, which I'd guess might be the Festival's biggest free event ever? Certainly the biggest I saw, in my time! It always seemed to be packed, and it was quite a large area - almost a shame it didn't become a permanent exhibition there.
Read MoreAs I mentioned yesterday, Kneehigh Theatre are one of my Festival favourites - and a company I'm always happy to see when I get a chance in other cities, too. From Tristan & Yseault to Brief Encounter and The Wild Bride, every show I've seen has a wonderful warmth to it - so it was great to have them back in Wellington in 2012, their second visit from their home in Cornwall.
Read MoreI should probably point out that, in doing these 'history' blogs, I'm obviously skipping over huge swaths of material. Given that each of the five Festivals I photographed represents some 30,000 images (yes, EACH) it's hard to go back through and pick, say, 20 to represent a day in the life. So, sometimes I'm picking a show I liked, or one that photographed particularly well; or just one where I think the images weren't seen by many people at the time, for whatever reason.
Read MoreWell, now that the Festival is rolling, it would usually be a tightly scheduled 24-day marathon for me, jumping from rehearsal to rehearsal to opening night function to post-show function, with the possibility of seeing something in between those two - and from looking back over the years, there were certainly a number of days like that!
Read MoreEven after the Dawn Ceremony is over, the preparations continue! The pressure is certainly on in the final week leading up to the shows starting, but sometimes the opening nights are staggered so as not to conflict with each other too much - so today, we have a few more preparation images before the shows kick off in full. Enjoy!
Read MoreI'm cheating slightly on this post - these didn't all happen on Feb 21 each year (which is tomorrow anyway, of course!), but the Dawn Ceremony / Powhiri to welcome the visiting artists is such an integral part of the New Zealand International Arts Festival that it only makes sense to see images from them together in one place, really.
Read MoreContinuing on from my previous post - here you can see the progress over a week of rehearsals for The Lindbergh Flight / The Flight Over The Ocean, the opera at the New Zealand Festival in 2008. As I mentioned then, the first image image here is a surprising match for one I took a week before, when we were in the rehearsal hall!
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