Te Atatu Me: Photographs of an urban New Zealand village
Te Atatu Me: Photographs of an urban New Zealand village
John B. Turner, with an essay by Grant Cole
PhotoForum and Turner PhotoBooks, 2015, 176 pp., $60
Designated PhotoForum #84, 2015
Reviewed by David Eggleton for Landfall Review Online
9 December 2015
Famously, Henri Cartier-Bresson declared in 1952: ‘the decisive moment’ in documentary photography – perhaps in all photography – is the ‘one moment at which the elements in motion are in balance … Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it.’
In his Te Atatu Me: Photographs of an urban New Zealand village, John B. Turner is the photographer glancing about as he walks around, and then responding decisively to something – some potential shot, some visual epiphany – glimpsed or spotted with his camera. Each the result of a ‘decisive moment’, the images in his book have been chosen, he tells us, from over 20,000 made over a seven-year period between 2005 and 2012: ‘These are photographs more or less of and from the street.’ They are centred on the neighbourhood in which he lived at the time, the suburb of Te Atatu North (or ‘Tat Norf’), on the Te Atatu Peninsula in West Auckland, bounded by Henderson Creek and by the Waitemata Harbour.
Read full review at Landfall Review Online