David Famularo
Over 130 scenes of Wellington City and the Greater Wellington Region, New Zealand, as photographed by Colin W. Antis in1979
1979 was a significant year for me, starting off with playing in a band touring its way up from Wellington to the second Nambassa Festival in January and ending with receiving meditation techniques from Guru Maharaj Ji in November at the Hans Jayanti Festival in Florida.
The official ending of a decade is not always reflected in dramatic changes in society and people’s lives.
But 1979 felt like it really did mark a significant change in New Zealand, not just for me, but many others.
Everything the “seventies” represented was swept away in what seemed like just a few months, as the darker energies which emerged with punk back in 1977 in this country became a tsunami.
It felt like colour was replaced by black, in everything from music to design.
Which is partly why this book, published in 2022, and which I discovered in For The Love Of Books in Featherston, is so interesting.
Anstis explains in the introduction that the origin of the book was a Photo-Forum photography workshop he attended in January 1979.
“Following the workshop, my objective was to undertake a photographic project of the Wellington region, focusing mainly on Wellington City.”
This was bookended by Anstis’s departure from New Zealand in May the same year to commence his OE in the United Kingdom.
Anstis goes on to say in the introduction that some readers may be tempted to view the images “as the calm before the storm” of divisive events like the South African Rugby Tour of New Zealand in 1981, and the controversial Neo-Liberal economic, government and social policies introduced by Labour in 1984 (AKA “Rogernomics”) but says “I prefer to leave such ruminations to others to reflect on.”
Anstis was born in Masterton, the same town I grew up in, moving with his family to Titahi Bay in Porirua six years later.
He had a particular interest in documentary photography, particularly of photographers like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange in the United States, and Brian Brake, Ans Westra, and John B Turner in New Zealand, the last being his tutor for the Photo Forum workshop.
It’s easy to see their subtle influence in the 130 images in this book.
Growing up in Masterton, and living in Wellington full-time for the first time in 1979, I can totally feel the mood of the times captured in this images.
What felt very ordinary and mundane then, looks and feels like a different world 45 years later.
1979 was a funny year. The mood was changing, the economic and social optimism of the 1970s replaced by the grim atmosphere of “Muldoonism” of the National Party led by Rob Muldoon.
While the photos of city and landscapes are interesting, it is the people which makes it particularly compelling, starting from the first photos in the book of people shopping at the fruit and vegetable market in Tory Street, a place I haunted a couple of years later.
The people captured are everyday, from the young woman selling vegetables at the market, to the coach driver getting passengers’ luggage out of the back of his bus, to the youths in a Mark III Zephyr, to the spectators at the local greyhound racing track.
I’ve always been of the opinion that photographing people is more challenging than landscapes.
Often Anstis’s photographs straddle both genres in the one shot, such as the photograph of a middle aged man, taken from behind, running down an empty central Wellington Street, the Edward Hopper vibe enhanced by the beautiful 1940s architecture.
His crowd scenes are as engaging as those of the famous photographers he admires, as are his portraits.
You feel that everyone has a story to tell of how they got to this momeent in their lives.
Anstis focused on the ordinariness of life in New Zealand in 1979, a time when we would have considered ours a rather boring and dull culture, and reveals it to have been far from ordinary four decades later.