Obituary: Robert Dick (Tom) Hutchins (1921 - 2007)

The death of the pioneer New Zealand photojournalist and art teacher, Robert Dick (Tom) Hutchins (85) occurred on 15 March, at his home in Auckland, where he was recuperating from a heart operation.

Tom Hutchins, self-portrait with Nikon, Fushin (Fuxin) coal mine, China, 1956 — Tom Hutchins, *self-portrait with Nikon, Fushin (Fuxin) coal mine, China*, 1956

Robert Dick Hutchins, known as "Tom" since boyhood, was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1921 and came to Auckland with his parents in 1923. He was the first son of waterside worker and political activist, Alma George Hutchins and Mary (neé Dick). He was educated at Auckland Grammar School. Tom Hutchins is survived by his wife Florence, three sons, a daughter, and three grandchildren.

Tom Hutchins is best known as an internationally respected photojournalist and teacher of film and photography. But many others will know him as a social activist deeply involved in medical and local body lobbying.

Tom Hutchins initially trained as a primary teacher and taught for one year. But, inspired by documentary films, and the photojournalism of Picture Post and Life, he joined the New Zealand Herald as a cadet photographer at the end of 1941, and subsequently enrolled for a Diploma in Journalism at the University of Auckland. He was a committed socialist, and rather than breach his pacifist beliefs during World War II, he accepted detention as a conscientious objector. He married Florence Woodward on 23 December 1946, with whom he recently celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary.

His first big break as a photojournalist came while he was working for the Christchurch photographers Green & Hahn, when his dramatic bird's eye view of the tragic fire that destroyed Ballantyne's department store in Christchurch on 18 November 1947 was published by Life.

After a stint on the New Zealand Herald, he worked for the Auckland Star in its heyday as the most advanced New Zealand newspaper for featuring its photographer’s work. He became their Chief Photographer in 1952. He covered the Royal Tour of 1953-54 in New Zealand and the Pacific, and in 1955 his controversial photo essay on substandard housing for Maori in central Auckland caused heated debate in Parliament and editorial pressure to back off such sensitive subjects. During this period he joined the New York based Black Star picture agency.

Long interested in Chinese history and the revolutionary changes taking place there, his opportunity to photograph in China came in 1956, at the cost of his job at the Auckland Star. With the New Zealand government discouraging contact with the People’s Republic of China, and U.S. photographers forbidden by their own Government to enter China, he became one of the first Western photojournalists to work there after the civil war. His visit coincided with what is considered a peak of enthusiasm and success for the revolution, before Mao Zedong’s 100 Flowers Campaign of liberalisation was reversed and the flawed Great Leap Forward and disastrous Cultural Revolution took place.

Hutchins’ China essay, of which a book and exhibition organised by John B. Turner, his University of Auckland colleague and Editor of PhotoForum, is in preparation, was the most comprehensive and significant of his career. In four months he covered east China from Canton (now Guanzhou), and Shanghai in the south, to Peking (Beijing), Shenyang, Anshan, and Changchun in the north. He also traveled northwest from Sian (Xian) to Wuhan, and across the Gobi desert to far west Urumchi. The majority of his work was done in black & white, but of his most striking colour work is his documentation of the ancient cave art works of remote Tunhuang (Dunhuang), including a famous 32 metre high Buddha. Other Western photographers, like the New Zealand born photographer Brian Brake and his Magnum colleagues had to wait a year before they could enter China. Life magazine published 23 of Hutchins’ photographs in a ten-page spread, titled ‘Red China on the March,’ in January 1957.

Hutchins’ China work is significant not only for its quality and scope, John Turner says, but because it reflects the influence of the Russians in China before Sino-Russian relations soured, and captures a short period of intense optimism among the people. In Beijing during the 8th People’s Congress of June 1956, Hutchins photographed Mao Tse Tung, Chou En-lai, Liu Shao-chi, and Soong Ching-ling (madame Sun Yat Sen) among prominent participants.

Always a critical and enquiring observer, Hutchins was hastened out of China by the authorities, two months before his visa expired. He, apparently, had asked too many questions about the huge influx of people moving to the north-west, which some observers link to Mao’s nuclear ambitions of the time and the perceived need to build armaments and industry away from the vulnerable east coast.

As Life’s South Pacific stringer, he also covering the Melbourne Olympics and other stories for Time, and Sports Illustrated. From 1960 to 1964 he lived in New South Wales with his young family, studied social anthropology at Sydney University and freelanced as a photographer. While tutoring in sociology at the University of New England in Armidale, he encouraged Professor Paul Beadle, head of the Elam School of Art, Auckland University, to add Photography as an independent discipline to the School’s curriculum. Consequently, Hutchins was appointed in 1965 as the first full-time University lecturer in photography and film in the British Commonwealth. Among his most prominent film students were Rodney Charters, Leon Narbey, David Blyth and Shareen Maloney. His notable photography students include Clive Bartleet, Clive Stone, Gael Newton, Fiona Clark, Ian Macdonald, Janet Bayly, Bruce Foster, and Megan Jenkinson, who lectures at Elam. Another student, Anne Noble, who teaches at Massey University, Wellington, was appointed New Zealand’s first Professor in Photography in 2006. Gael Newton, now Curator of Photography at the Australian National Gallery, Canberra, is an eminent historian of photography.

Hutchins was a liberal teacher who emphasised the experiential nature of art as personal expression and encouraged social awareness without dogma. Committed to promoting his student’s own concerns, he virtually never showed them his own photography, which is much less known than it deserves.

His work in films included being a cameraman with Rodney Charters for Room 2 (1968), and was the sole cameraman for A Film of Real Time: A Light Environment (1970). Both films were directed by Leon Narbey. In 1974 he both filmed and photographed medical facilities in Tonga and Western Samoa for the World Health Organisation. Throughout his career he occasionally worked as a radio broadcaster on art, health, and neglected social issues. He was, for example, a researcher for the Grenada Television series, ‘World in Action’ on subjects including the Mt Erebus air disaster (1979), and the bombing of Greenpeace’s ‘Rainbow Warrior’ in Auckland by the French secret service. (1985).

A prominent writer and critic on photography and film, Tom Hutchins was a founding member of PhotoForum Inc. and onetime President. He was a selector for, and wrote the catalogue introduction to The Active Eye: Contemporary New Zealand Photography survey exhibition of 1975. He was picture editor of By Batons and Barbed Wire, the record of the 1981 protest against the tour of the Apartheid South African rugby team, written by Tom Newnham and instigated by Ian Macdonald of Real Pictures Gallery. Tom Hutchins also wrote the introduction to the late Terry O’Connor’s All Good Children: Life in a New Zealand Children’s Health Camp (1983) published by PhotoForum.

When the Auckland City Art Gallery closed down ‘The Active Eye’ exhibition, due to objections raised against sexually explicit words written on prints by transvestites photographed by Fiona Clark, Hutchins organised a public forum on censorship and freedom of speech, to discuss the issues.

Tom Hutchins retired from the University of Auckland in 1981. He continuing to do occasional assignments for Black Star, and became more intensely involved in lobbying for improved preventative care and medical and developmental facilities for people with cerebral palsy and other disabilities, like his twin sons, Barrie and Matthew.

As William Main and John B. Turner concluded in their anthology, New Zealand Photography from the 1840s to the Present (PhotoForum Inc., 1993), ‘While Hutchins' own photography and film-making is little-known today, due largely to his own reticence, his influence as a teacher (1965-80) and critic has been profound.