View from the Road: Exploring New Zealand from State Highway 1

by Arno Gasteiger, with an essay by Kennedy Warne

(Penguin, 2014), 208 pp., $65

Reviewed by David Eggleton for Landfall Review Online

9 December 2015

Beginning with a sunshine-gilded empty street in the township of Bluff, and finishing in front of the lit-up lighthouse at Cape Reinga/Te Rerenga Wairua as darkness falls, the sequence of photographs by Arno Gasteiger in View from the Road: Exploring New Zealand from State Highway 1 traverses the 2047 kilometres of State Highway 1 in search of prospects, vistas, panoramas, landmarks. State Highway 1 is, Kennedy Warne argues in his introductory essay, ‘a road of history’, one offering ‘sites of memory’ and ‘a repository of stories’. Warne gives us some of the chronological history and a sense of the road’s heritage, but the stories are mainly implicit in Gasteiger’s distinctive and expansive images.

Read full review at Landfall Review Online