See What I can See

Photography was invented the year before the Treaty of Waitangi was signed. Within a few years, cameras were charting the life and times of people at this end of the planet. See What I Can See is a celebration of the camera – the New Zealand that it captured, and the artists who wielded it. It is a book about darkness and light, about careful planning and doing things on the spur of the moment, about the quickness of digital photography and the slowness of old technology. It’s a woman driving a tractor and a kid in a Colgate tube, a rock at Ngauruhoe and a Wahine survivor on a cart, it’s surfies and selfies and cabbages the size of kings.