John Fields Maker of Pictures

E Type Jaguar and Central Auckland, 1972

Right, Don Gifford and boat, Auckland, 1969

Centre, Don Gifford's boots, Auckland, 197 4

Bottom, Don Gifford's kitchen, Auckland, 1975

Around 197 4, I was privileged to meet Peter and Claudia Eyley in Auckland and, through them, a host of artists and writers who gathered at their house in Mount Eden or at the Kiwi Hotel near Auckland University.

Several of these people worked part-time or full-time at the University or at the adjacent Elam Art School: the sculptor Greer Twiss, painters including Bob Ellis, Don Binney and Pat Hanly who, with Claudia Eyley, taught drawing to architecture students and life­drawing to art students. Others, including musician Bruce Robertson, sculptor Phil Dadson, painters Ralph Hotere, Philippa Blair and Andrew Bogle, and writers including Philip Wilson, Sam Hunt, Hone T uwhare, Mike Morrissey, Judith Binney, Russell Haley and Riemke Ensing, were presences in that floating world which constituted a large part of Auckland's literary and artistic scene, and thereby New Zealand's glory in terms of international artistic repute.

In several of the houses in which I moved, John Fields was a welcome visitor, at times propping an eight-by-ten camera in a kitchen or lounge room in order to photograph a mantlepiece laden with books, ornaments, tools, pictures or whatever the inhabitants had left there. The resultant eight-by-ten inch plates were intimate records of character-and some of the occupants of those houses were characters in every sense of the word.

John was a regular at the Kiwi Hotel's Friday night bohemian gatherings, which flourished for a brief period of years before an altercation between patrons and management took the entire clientele to another watering hole, in Freeman's Bay.

Among that crowd of much-travelled people-including regular sojourners in Mexico, Sweden and elsewhere-John Fields' American accent was nevertheless distinctive. He was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts and educated in a Rockport art colony. He joined the US Navy on his seventeenth birthday and became an avid photographer during his service in the Pacific and Asia. He later studied colour photography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was told 'make pictures, don't just take them!'.

That advice; like his accent, still attaches to him. He freelanced in America and took part in expeditionary film studies under Harvard's Robert Gardener. During those years, John Fields came to see photography as threatened and cheapened by commercialism. He decided to keep his personal work separate from commercial activities when he saw photographs by Harry Callahan at the Carl Siembab Gallery in Boston. This division still characterises his output.

To many of his colleagues, John is the professional technical officer, managing a university's photography section, or supporting its information services. To those who know him outside the institutional walls, Fields is one of the most technically accomplished creative photographers in Australia or New Zealand.

The division between 'technical' and 'creative' careers-each supporting the other--<om­menced around 1965 when he joined the Massachusetts General Hospital as a photog­rapher in electron microscopy. His first exhibition of personal work came soon after.

His aim was to 'record and portray a preconceived mood' in his photographs. In the following year, he exhibited 19 'rare' photographs of the Cape Ann area. The rarity consisted in the subjects-disappearing landmarks, such as an old lighthouse destroyed by fire-and in the limited edition which Fields exhibited. At that time he treated each photograph like an original artwork, making only one printirom the negative, charging a high price and refusing to permit reproductions of his work. Enlarged and titled The Garden of Man, the exhibition toured the north-eastern states for two years.

John moved to Auckland in 1966 to assist a leading cell biologist with research at Auckland University. He stayed for ten years, after being initially shocked at discovering himself in a 'cultural vacuum'.

The appearance of The Photographer's Eye exhibition in 1967 and in particular, John Szarkowski's revelation of picture-making concerns, drove him to rethink his American experience. Soon after, Fields met Gary Baigent, John Turner and other New Zealand

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photographers who provided each other with a critical forum, and helped make the 'vacuum' bearable. At this stage, John thought of his per­sonal work as divided into 'creative' or 'record' subjects-sunlit reflections, shadows, barns and so on; deliberately composed pictures. He saw his more candid observations of people and environments as having social or historic value only, since they lacked 'artistic intent'.

He later became photographer in charge of the electron microscopy unit at the Anatomy Department of the School of Medicine. He inven­ted and designed specialised equipment and photographed for publications and teaching pur­poses as well. This application of craft was not a thing apart from John's interest in making pictures outside the laboratory. From 1969, triggered by Lincoln Kerstein's essay and Walker Evans' classic American Photographers, Fields came to perceive that the quality of detail and realism he sought in his own work could not be obtained with his habitual 35 mm system. The arrival of his 5 x 7 view camera (which he had chiefly used for commercial colour work in the US) provided him with the tool for merging the 'creative' and 'record' aspects of his personal work.

The photographs he took around Auckland with this camera provided the base for later extended photo-essays. In his Auckland work, John followed the Evans and Kerstein pictorialist premise that photography's strength and purpose is social-the revelation of 'our homes and times' without 'the intrusion of the poet's or painter's comment or necessary distortion'.

In the years that followed, John recorded aspects of the city and country which he appreciated with a new sense of freedom. Some of his images were coolly ironic-a silo with the legend Apollo 12 USA painted down its length; a row-boat labelled USS Enterprise moored in a stream, a bulldozer with a painted sign The Saint, parked by a rural roadside.

These images were exhibited with 23 others as John's contribution to Three New Zealand Photographers at the Auckland City Art Gallery in 1973; the other photographers were Gary Baigent and Richard Collins. The irony in many of his photographs containing human artefacts stemmed, in the opinion of New Zealand critic John Turner, from the thwarting of Fields' childhood love of rural life by the urban circumstances of much of his adult life.

Between 1973 and 1977, at weekends and other times when he could escape from Auckland with a large-format camera, John made hundreds of exposures of the mountainous country of the Coromandel Peninsula on the east coast. These black and white photographs were the most widely-known secret among John's friends, and those who admired his work in New Zealand. His photo-essay on the old gold-mining town of Thames led to his award of a Queen Elizabeth 11 Arts Council Grant in 1975. The grant was an accolade for an extraordinary labour of love.

In 1976, John moved to Australia and worked freelance for two years. One of his preoccu­pations was an industrial archaeology project in Sydney. He also taught practical applica­tions of photography and photographic history at the Paddington Centre for Photography. In more recent years his documentary concern has found expression in archival audio record­ings, wildlife photography consultancies and workshops.

His first 'regular' employment as a photographer in Australia came in 1978 when he joined the Australian Museum as a photographer of objects, activities and people. A publishing career, begun in 1963 in Massachusetts and pursued through ten years of New Zealand exhibitions, documentary film-making and newspaper, magazine and specialist publishing, continued in Australia.

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Group publications and joint publications indicate the difficulties of gaining solo representation. In 1970, John edited Photography A Visual Dialect featuring ten New Zealand photographers. His solo work appeared chiefly in photography and heritage publications. In Australia he has also been represented in collaborative publications. John was one of three photographers who contributed to the 1983 volume Minerals of Broken Hill. Two years later, he co­authored Jim Specht' s Frank Hurley in Papua New Guinea, a book printed from original negatives in the Australian Museum's Hurley collection. The conservation and restoration work signalled by these two volumes is of a piece with Victorian Auckland, co-produced with John Stacpoole in 1973, a book which became the basis for a documentary film which Fields wrote, narrated and co-directed.

In several areas of his work at the Australian Museum, John's contributions to scientific research will have wider effects. One example is his participation in tours to Lake Mungo, Kinchega and other state and national parks between 1982 and 1986, when he led parties and provided instruction in photography, including remote sensing techniques for ground studies.

His part in instigating the visionary Australian Photographic Access Network, a group of major Sydney institutions holding large photographic archives, appears to me to be one of the major achievements of his Australian career. This project, ahead of its time and still far from implementation, involves the participation of archives like the Mitchell Library, Sydney University's Macleay Museum, the Australian Museum and other organizations. In the initial plan, these archives would contribute to a catalogue recording all the images held by them, together with all the information that could be gathered about each photograph. In this way, the Network would provide an unparalleled historical resource for the future.

What then is John Fields' private work all about? With his New Zealand colleagues of former years, I think his work is characterised by the cool beauty of its deliberately formal elements as much as by the subject matter. While it is possible to locate series or sequences of subjects and even to identify several themes which run through his work, I think it folly to distinguish the form and the content of these photographs. His work poses as many questions as it answers. John Fields composes his pictures in a way that points up the tension inherent in the idea of 'making' photographs-quite distinct from 'taking' them. How can such an artist absent himself from his work, in the way that Lincoln Kerstein suggested? How is it possible to present any image 'surgically, without the intrusion of the poet's or the painter's comment or necessary distortion'? Is a distortion-free photograph possible, never mind desirable?

Like all artists who have not had early patronage as their birthright, John Fields has had to make his way against the grain, and the experience has given his work a cerebral edge that has been worked at rather than resisted. Much as 'conceptual art' in painting can appear at first unnerving in its ironic portrayal of familiar images 'framed' in such a way as to isolate them from familiar bearings and indices, John Fields' photographs draw us in to contemplate familiar­seeming arrangements-objects, planes and tones-in isolation from the familiar clutter and circumstances through which we fleetingly glimpse or filter them.

Left, Vandalised War Memorial, Auckland, 1973

Right, Richard Collins' coop, Auckland, 1969

Centre left, John Fields ( photo Robyn McDougal}

Centre right, Ben Lomond, NSW, 1993

Bottom, Wash house sink, Mt. Eden, Auckland

Therein lies the paradox: he has framed his subjects in such a way as to compel our meditation on vision itself. Is this a 'distortion' of the usual process, by which we merely glance at an object, registering it only in terms of its relation to its surrounding and to our own position, warmth, tiredness, hunger and other determinants of comfort and interest?

These photographs disrupt our disinterestedness or lack of interest. They advise us of the presumed gulf existing between ourselves and nature, between each other; between concepts of art and reality, 'creativeness' and 'straight' description. Is any description-of a mood, preconceived or not-' straight'? John Turner speculated that Fields could be offering us wry jokes, or warnings, in photographs of our attempts to domesticate or personify machines. I think that both the joke and the warning can be reconciled. We seek by these 'frozen' gestures to close the gap between ourselves and our productions, to reintegrate commodities into a 'natural' cycle.

In New England, NSW, where John Fields has lived since 1987, he has been largely occupied with projects for others. This is not to say he has abandoned his private interrogation of the processes of vision. His photographs of rural subjects, of people and objects recorded with the painstaking attention to detail in every phase of the picture-making process, show the extraordinary tension of all his 'personal' work. His personal work incorporates the professional recording role which has recommended him to successive organizations. At the same time, he reveals the critical eye in each of graceful visual commentary on the continual contradictions in society's poignant attempts to bridge the gap between the world and the individual.

Michael Sharkey

An exhibition of John Fields' photographs will be held at Wright College, University of New England, Armidale, in late October.