Authors – Photographs by Alan Knowles

Alan Knowles

Waitohi Community Hub and Library

1st Floor Waitohi, Johnsonville Library
34 Moorefield Road, Johnsonville, Wellington.

Exhibition dates: 12 June 2021 until late 2021 (closing date yet to be confirmed)

Opening function: Saturday 12 June, 2pm - 3pm.
Floor talk by Alan Knowles: Saturday 7 August 2021, 2pm

Waitohi hours: Mon-Fri 9:30-am to 7pm, Sat & Sun 10am to 4pm

Presented by the Photography Aotearoa Charitable Trust

A new exhibition opens on Saturday 12 June at the Waitohi Community Hub and Library in Johnsonville. Authors – Photographs by Alan Knowles is presented by the Photography Aotearoa Charitable Trust and features more than seventy New Zealand and overseas novelists, poets, non-fiction writers, and other authors. The exhibition has its origins as a personal project in the 1990s when photographer Alan Knowles, who was a regular attendee at events hosted by the New Zealand Book Council (now ReadNZ Te Pou Muramura), offered to make a series of pro bono portraits for the Council’s archives. Some of those original silver-gelatin prints are reproduced in this exhibition, which also pays homage to the administrators and booksellers responsible for touring and promoting the authors’ work.

After visiting Europe in 2000, Alan became the principal representative in New Zealand of the Paris-based Agence Opale, a photographic agency specialising in author portraits, and in this role he covered many Writers and Readers Week events: some of those photographs also feature in the show. In February 2004 he was invited by the NZ Book Council executive director, Karen Ross, to photograph the ‘Words on Wheels’ tour of Otago and Southland. The purpose of these tours was to introduce school pupils and other members of the public to writers who would read from their work and answer questions, and a mini-photo essay embedded within the larger exhibition tells the story of the seven exhausting days spent giving readings in 19 different venues. The tour included a visit to Janet Frame’s old family home in Eden St, Oamaru, where the group was warned to expect spooky camera failures: the image ‘Unplanned Double Exposure’ was the result.

Alan Knowles originally learned the craft of photography from his father in Queenstown in the 1950s, and vividly recalls the hours he spent in his dad’s darkroom, pushing his prints through the developing and fixing baths before washing and drying them on the glazer that gave them that high-gloss finish we still associate with the black-and-white film stills of the era. Alan’s developed a documentary practice that often highlights his advocacy of social justice and his compassion for the less well-off. Other projects have included poverty in Palmerston North in 1982; the workers in the Campbell Tube factory in Thames and the Griffin’s Biscuit Factory in Waiwhetu; Poverty in Murupara, Minginui and Kaingaroa Forest; the homeless in Wellington; aged care workers in residential homes; and water allocation and misuse in Canterbury.

The authors included in the exhibition range from household New Zealand names such as Margaret Mahy, Fiona Kidman and CK Stead, through international bestsellers such as novelist Frederick Forsythe, comedian Michael Palin, and iconoclast Richard Dawkins, to award-winning New Zelander Catherine Chidgey, author of the best-selling The Wish Child, and Canadian academic and environmental activist David Suzuki. Apart from the Words on Wheels series, almost all were photographed in Wellington, giving the portraits a distinct local edge. Featuring as it does such a wide-ranging set of writers, the exhibition is perfectly suited to its venue and will provide library staff the opportunity to showcase their work.

Authors – Photographs by Alan Knowles is presented by Photography Aotearoa and curated by John Williams and Mark Beehre. Photography Aotearoa is a charitable trust set up to ‘encourage, enrich and inspire photography in Aotearoa New Zealand’, and this show follows on from their long-running and immensely popular ‘A Walk Down Johnsonville Rd’, documentary-style images from the 1960s by John B Turner that captured a streetscape and a way of life that has now disappeared but remains imprinted in the memories of many viewers. Photography Aotearoa’s ultimate aim is to establish a dedicated photography gallery in downtown Wellington, and as they work towards that goal they are presenting various exhibitions in different venues around Wellington. Their next offerings will be a series of exhibitions on the premises of Photospace Gallery in Courtenay Place including young artists’ responses to 2020; self-portraits by Wellington photographers; ‘The Last Race’ – documentary images of the thoroughbred racing industry; and a unique set of colour photographs of the 1981 Wellington Test Day protest when anti-Springbok Tour protesters clashed with police.

Mark Beehre
June 2021