Book Review: See What I Can See: New Zealand Photography for the Young and Curious, by Greg O’Brien

Available now in bookshops nationwide.

‘You are a camera. Your eye is a lens. You open your eyes and images register inside you. Some images remain there a long time. Some might even stay with you for the rest of your life.’

If See What I Can See can be considered a guidebook to New Zealand photography, then Gregory O’Brien is our knowledgeable tour guide. He takes us through the many photographs in the book and teaches us how to see them. As well as being a painter, literary critic, and art curator, O’Brien has written many books of poetry, fiction, and essays. This is not his first book about art aimed at the ‘young and curious’; he has also written Welcome to the South Seas (2004) and Back and Beyond (2008). Both of those books won the Non-Fiction Prize at the New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children and Young People. There is arguably no better arts writer in New Zealand, and in See What I Can See, O’Brien draws on his long term experience to showcase an extraordinary range of images made by New Zealand photo-artists.

See What I Can See may be pitched as being for younger people (I would say ages 9 – 15), but this book would make an excellent introduction for anyone interested in the subject. O’Brien’s approach is funny, anecdotal, and intimate: he’s a story-teller and we are drawn to the images by his stories. The history of photography features lightly in the book, and includes the construction of cameras such as Darren Glass’s ingenious Frisbee camera and the rise of the selfie. What is particularly special about O’Brien’s approach is the way he not only shows us how photography captures what is there, but how it captures what the photo-artist feels. So while photography can be historical, abstract, beautiful, mysterious, and documentary, it is also a individual’s perception of the world.

Such beautifully produced non-fiction books are a specialty for Auckland University Press. It is obvious that care has been take to reproduce images from many of New Zealand’s great photo-artists: Laurence Aberhart, Peter Peryer, Marti Friedlander, Ans Westra, and Brian Brake. The text states, ‘Great photographs can often take us to places where words can’t follow them,’ and it is an idea played out in the sections on hands and faces, and also the surreal studio dreamscapes. In the acknowledgements O’Brien states, ‘I have been lucky, over the years, to spend time with some great photographers. More than anything else, what I’ve learned from them is a state of attentiveness, of looking closely and working intuitively.’ The same praise can be given to O’Brien: he asks us to be attentive and to look closely, and through that attentiveness to see his idea of beauty.

Reviewed by Sarah Jane Barnett

See What I Can See: New Zealand Photography for the Young and Curious
by Gregory O’Brien
Published by Auckland University Press, RRP: $34.99
ISBN 9781869408435

My animals and other family, by Susanna Andrew

When I was small I avoided non-fiction the way other children avoided vegetables. I skipped the history in the School Journal and went straight to the fiction bar. In my reading habits, I was fact-averse. There was, however, one non-fiction book that I swallowed whole: The World of Pets.

I was given it for my birthday when I was eight years old. It was a large, hefty book with full-colour plates and chapter headings such as How to Care for Mice, Keeping Guinea Pigs and Which Breed of Cat Is For You? I loved its grave and factual tone. There were animals in that book that I could only dream of having – cats with pedigrees, silky rabbits, chubby hamsters, voles, and even chestnut horses with long manes. My animal-loving obsession was tolerated by my family. They nicknamed me Daktari, and banned all pets inside the house.

Perhaps it was being the youngest of eight siblings that made me want to be the boss of others, but it was true that whatever was able to be caught and brought up in a cage, I had at some stage tried to be the master of. As Seamus Heaney put it, “I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied /specks to range on window-sills at home,..and wait and watch until, the fattening dots burst into nimble -/swimming tadpoles”.

I bred mice in different colours in a four-storey cage built by the caretaker at the school my mother taught in. The cage allowed me to partition off floors and separate the babies from the males, who sometimes ate them. I also owned a cat, some goldfish and an axolotl. I kept guinea pigs named Wilbur (but of course) and Charlotte – and all of their offspring. I had an aviary which housed ring-necked doves, quails and finches. I managed this whole animal kingdom alone, with the book as my guide.

One day, the caretaker at my mother’s school arrived in her class with an orphaned baby possum and my mother brought it home for me. It was a tiny pet furball, the cutest thing imaginable, and it clung to me. Whenever I picked it up it climbed up on to my head and sat spreadeagled in my hair. One morning I woke to find the possum was missing from its cage. I remember crying in the morn-ing before school.

There was no chapter in The World of Pets titled How To Look After Your Pet Possum. It could only have contained the unhelpful sentence ‘It doesn’t belong to you’. The writing in that book was prosaic and encyclopaedic but at the age of eight it gave me my fictional life: Hamster Trainer, Rabbit Keeper, Horse Owner.

Susanna Andrew is co-editor with Jolisa Gracewood of Tell You What: Great New Zealand Nonfiction 2015 published by Auckland University Press RRP $30.00 ISBN 9781869408244

Susanna Andrew and Jolisa Gracewood, image copyright Marti Friedlander