Ōtautahi Christchurch
Aotearoa New Zealand
©2025 Tim J. Veling
Selected images from larger project.
The following interview between Hannah Watkinson and Tim J. Veling was undertaken via email in July 2022 during the lead up to Photobook/NZ 2022, Te Papa Tongarewa and Massey University Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa.
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Hannah Watkinson: You’re on the precipice of re-releasing work from your first major project, Red Bus Diary. You’re reimagining images made for that work into a new book, titled Trench Foot. We’ve spoken a lot about the significance of the ‘first major project’ to an artist’s practice; how its culmination is often the hardest fought, the fondest to look back on but also the easiest to find faults in! Can you outline how you feel about Red Bus Diary, perhaps describing how your world has changed since its publication and what compelled you to re-edit it?
Tim J. Veling: It’s coming up to twenty years since I started what became Red Bus Diary. I began that project as part of my postgraduate studies without any notion of what form it would take in the end. All I knew was I wanted to make some kind of record of my experiences while assuming the role of tourist in my home city. Essentially, I wanted to prove to friends overseas that you needn’t fly to far-off, exotic places to have your eyes opened to the vastness of the world.
For some backstory, during that early time I was very sick from chronic Crohn’s disease. I was in and out of hospital and receiving a new kind of anti-inflammatory infusion every six weeks to try to get on top of things. Because of the need to remain close to medical and familial support, I wasn’t able to venture far from home.
In essence, I started to get really annoyed at receiving postcards from friends telling me how I could never truly grow, never know I was alive or how lucky I had it until witnessing (insert clichéd scenario here) in Bangkok, London, Amsterdam, Mexico City, etc. One day I received a note about how English curry was so much more authentic than what we get in New Zealand. I couldn’t handle it anymore — the pretentious condescension. I was so incensed that I grabbed my camera and jumped on a bus. I wanted to take photographs of Christchurch, scan and send them in an email message to remind this person where they’d come from. I never imagined that moment of spite would morph into a four-year obsession, let alone a published book.
As might be obvious so far, I wasn’t particularly happy with my lot at the outset of the project. Unfortunately, this feeling persisted throughout the majority of the years following, even after being given the ‘all clear’ by my doctor. I was twenty-five years old when I finished the work, so the narrative I crafted from my experiences strongly reflects preoccupations of that age: the struggle to find independence, my own sense of belonging and place, a personal philosophy and identify and so on. I tried not to make it too much of an exercise in navel gazing, but in hindsight things crossed the line at times. The book was published not long after I finished my MFA and I haven’t reread a single word of the text since. I worry it would open old wounds.
I think it’s easy to look back and see faults in old work, but it’s also possible to see unrealised potential. I was so obsessed during that period with particular photographers — Robert Frank, Josef Koudelka, Henri Cartier-Bresson, among others — so it follows that on some level, for me at least, the images I selected mirror those strong influences and show me trying to find my own voice within a particular set of conventions. In hindsight, however, it’s clear the proverbial shoe did not fit. I made what I consider some strong images during that time, but the process of making them and the ego involved in that kind of work never sat well with my temperament. This is partly why I emphasised the text accompanying the images in the book. The words helped contextualise the visual element and served to reinforce my own voice.
Anyway, every time I left the house it felt like I was climbing out of the trenches and heading into combat. I had to really push myself out of my comfort zone to capture images that contained any drama analogous to work by those aforementioned models. After three years, my shoes — a street photographer’s most essential bit of gear — felt well and truly rotten!
To cut a long story short, since then a lot of water has passed under the bridge. The Christchurch earthquakes have eradicated many of the backdrops to those old images. I’ve married, have an eight-year-old daughter and a privileged job at the university I once studied at. Almost everything has changed, especially my outlook. After almost twenty years, it seemed as good a time as any to dip back into old proof-sheets and see what I might find. Avoiding the text component of the original book, I wanted to reassess the photographs by bringing my present-day self to them.
HW: I remember the first time I heard you tell the story of the conception of Red Bus Diary. It was when I was in my final year of high school and was attending a workshop at Ilam as a taster of life at art school. It made me consider the reason why people became practicing artists and, as an eighteen-year-old, the concept of a long-term project like that was terrifying!
What I’d like to talk more about, based on what you’ve said so far, is the concept of influence and the photographers that you were ‘obsessed with’. I’m aware of the heady excitement that comes with the emulation of big, famous hot-shot photographers. I think most young artists wear their heroes on their sleeves!
I know, however, that you also had some influences closer to home, like Glenn Busch, who was teaching you at the time, as well as Peter Black. The New Zealand photography scene is excellent in that for the most part it’s tight and easy to rub shoulders with our idols, so to speak. I want to hear your thoughts on the significance of these people to your work. I ask because when I embarked on my own long-term, place-based project, which eventually ended up being about the Buller region of the West Coast, I certainly saw you as a photographer I wished to emulate. Maybe not exactly your style, but your commitment and the revisiting aspect of some of your later work, particularly in post-quake Christchurch.
TV: I’m flattered you saw me as a kind of influence. Not to be too self-deprecating, but I guess that’s pretty much inevitable when someone is your teacher for four years. For me, that major teacher and mentor was Glenn. He was the person who hooked me on the potential of photography. When I met him in my first year of art school, I’d literally never taken a photograph. He taught the medium not only as a means of artistic expression, but more importantly, as a way to engage with and reflect on the world around me.
Supervision meetings with Glenn were always stimulating. We rarely talked about specific photographs or photographers, instead concentrating on ideas broadly related to the making, circulation and reading of images in general. We’d discuss social-political systems, editorial responsibility and my work’s potential to spark thought in others. One Friday, Glenn came into my studio to wish me a good weekend. As he was leaving, he asked me whom I was voting for in the general elections the next day. I was concentrating on something and gave a non-committal answer. He stopped, pulled up a chair and put down his bag, then sat down right opposite me. After two hours — no exaggeration — he’d given a lecture about the origins of the Labour Party, the 1984 neo-liberal shift and Ruth Richardson’s ‘Mother of all Budgets’, plus the relative pros and cons of certain left and right ideologies up to 1999 — all without telling me what to think. It was a really intense time, but I loved it.
I knew little about Glenn’s photographic practice as he was always very cagey about sharing it with students — at least, that was my impression at the time. By then he’d moved on to writing, specifically oral histories. It followed that he encouraged me to elaborate on my images with text; to complement the visual narrative with extended pieces of writing that didn’t explain but rather immersed the reader in a context that revealed something not able to be understood through images alone.
Glenn introduced me to Peter Black’s 50 Photographs and Moving Pictures as examples of work by someone who embraced the ambiguity of images and worked in a manner not too dissimilar to me, close to home. I remember him swivelling on his chair, reaching for the bookshelf and pulling out a tatty copy of Sport. We were discussing text within images — how it can be very directive or, if done well, add another level of ambiguity and narrative potential. He opened to one of Black’s moody black-and-white images of a man riding a bike, the words ‘TO RISE’ extending out from his mouth and a power pole protruding out the top of his head. This combination of details, compressed within the picture plane and captured from the odd perspective of a moving car window triggered my imagination. I’d been photographing out of bus windows during my travels and made a good many images I liked, but very few of them transcended a ‘this is what I saw’ kind of record of travel. Moving Pictures had the extra ingredients I was searching for: the magic feeling of being in the right place at the right time; the camera’s capacity to juxtapose and render otherwise disparate details as closely related; and of stilling time and revelling in ambiguous meaning. For the picture Glenn showed me, I recognised the location as the old Edmonds factory on Ferry Road. Beyond that and more importantly, however, I saw allegorical, subliminal messages.
Other photographers I very much admired at the time were Anne Noble — I saw her retrospective show, States of Grace, at City Gallery Wellington — and Bruce Connew. Bruce introduced me to work by Gilles Peress, Paul Graham, Sophie Calle and many others. He had an amazing book collection. When I visited as a young student, he made me bottomless cups of tea — I hate tea! — and pulled publication after publication out to show me, all the time talking about ideas, technique and photographer backstories. Later, I was blown away by David Cook’s Lake of Coal — now that’s how to realise a long-term project! From there, I admired Ann Shelton’s Red Eye and Public Places, as well as Mark Adams’s Land of Memories. I also loved the work by Haru Sameshima that was later published as Bold Centuries.
How about you, in which ways did Glenn influence your practice? Afterall, he taught both of us.
HW: I can vividly picture your conversation about politics with Glenn. I think that touches something I’ve been considering when thinking about him lately, in that he is one of those rare people who genuinely cares about things. When I was a student, he often came across as very intense, but it was because he wanted us to really understand what we were looking at and care in a similarly intense way.
It’s almost a relief to now be at the point where I can mooch around Glenn’s apartment with a coffee or a wine, to be honest. Some of his early critique definitely left me feeling like I had no clue what I was doing! It was a blur of lessons projected via OHPs, him reading through my scrappy attempts at writing with a fine-toothed comb while scribbling notes with a pencil and sometimes — if I was unprepared — the ‘I’m not mad, just disappointed’ speech he gave so well.
But like I say, it’s because he genuinely cares about people, their stories, their potential. He really paved the way for Ilam to have an incredibly strong level of ethical value in relation to image making, something that has set us in the best stead to weather the relatively tumultuous era of ethics in photography during the past twenty or so years, right? That’s not without frustration, of course. Students these days shy away from photographing people. They’ve grown up with social media and all the problems of representation that has brought to the fore.
On that note, I’m keen to hear your take on where you see this work sitting now within a couple of contexts. The first relates to the ethics of the work, the way it was taken and presented originally versus how it has been re-edited in the form of Trench Foot. You said to me once that you’re not sure you could do such work now if you were just starting out. What makes you say that? Second, I want to know a bit more about the rationale behind choosing to be liberated from the element of text in this reconsideration, and how that feels. Red Bus Diary is so text heavy, and I know you say you haven’t read a word of it since it was published, but I’m interested in this change.
TV: The ethics question is hard and I’m very anxious about how to answer it. So much depends on standards of practice, conventions of the discipline and expectations of the time. It’s important to be honest and re-evaluate things as you learn and individual and collective values shift, but it’s not always a straightforward case of casting a 2022 lens on things made decades before.
When I was working towards Red Bus Diary, social media was still a way off and digital photography was in its infancy. Home broadband was an urban legend — much like the South Canterbury Black Panther — and e-communication was s..l..ooo..w... This is not to suggest the advent of these things fundamentally changed what have always been important ethical considerations for photographers; rather, they complicated and highlighted problems that were all too easy to brush under the carpet before.
Also, the way in which people flippantly transmit and comment on images now — often anonymously and viciously — was incomprehensible to me back then. I was never sharing my work widely when making Red Bus Diary, and I was always very conscious of keeping it in a closed loop of colleagues who understood how seriously I took it. When any work is published, however, the author ultimately relinquishes control. I knew this well, so was very conscious of the need to build a tight narrative framework for the work to be understood in context. I let go of that control in 2006 when Red Bus Diary was published.
As indicated before, I saw the book as primarily an autobiographical work. As such, the combination of images and text were tightly edited to convey my experiences and thoughts on place, very much coloured by my mindset at the time. Many people generously shared their time, company and opinions with me back then. I was as honest as possible about where my photographs and transcripts of our interactions might end up. It was a far simpler set of outcomes back then too: a book, exhibition and maybe a portfolio website. Easy, or so it seemed. No release forms and such either, for better or worse.
That said, there are of course many images I captured candidly through bus windows or on the street without consent. This was always the side of things that challenged me the most. It still challenges me to look at these images to be honest, even if legally it’s fine to do so — they’re not defamatory or being used to sell a commercial product. This is where the name for this new book, Trench Foot, comes from. Like I said before, photographing that way always felt like jumping into close-quarters combat. I just felt rotten doing it, but held on to the idea that to be a successful street photographer you need to be right in there, right in the middle of drama as it happens, much like William Klein or Garry Winogrand were many years before me on the streets of New York or downtown L.A. This was a hard task in sleepy Christchurch. To try and dispel this rotten feeling, I quickly developed an approach that better suited me, although even then the shoes never truly fit.
After photographing candidly on the street, I’d more often than not introduce myself and tell people what I’d seen in them or within the moment that compelled me to take a photograph of them. Ninety-nine percent of the time this resulted in a few laughs or a good yarn and extra photographs — usually better — and after processing the film I’d try to post them a copy as thanks. The remaining one percent of people politely requested I not use their image. In that case, I apologised and promised I would respect their wishes. In all this time, there were only two people who displayed hostility towards my actions. One was outside Harry’s Bar on Gloucester Street, where it was alleged they ran an illegal bare-knuckles boxing ring after hours. The other was outside Ballantyne’s department store. I wasn’t photographing anything to do with the shop, but a woman ran at me and flew into a rage. She presented herself as a manager and accused me of committing commercial espionage.
Looking back, I recognise my absolute privilege within all of this. Usually people actively try to avoid conflict in public places in order to maintain face and not make a fuss, especially if the person in front of them is a tall, Pākehā male. I also know that while I feel confident of my good intentions, other people may not share the same outlook or values I do. It’s a really hard line to walk, but ultimately the law is the law. Too many people confuse ethics with morals when arguing against certain kinds of art, especially in photography.
Your second question was why liberate the images from the text and re-edit the photographic sequence? After writing the small essay above, I’m not sure I have a clear answer. Except to say that most of the images in this new book were never used — I didn’t recognise them as interesting images on the proof-sheets way back when. For other images, I originally chose alternative versions, thinking at the time they were better or, in conjunction with the text, more in keeping with the tone of the time. A few images that are included in both publications are very special to me for reasons I don’t feel a need to share. Ditching the text for this version does not mean I’m disowning it; rather, I’m interested in letting the images speak for themselves without such an overt tie to a specific past. I will say too, that this is not the definitive edit. I’m not interested in ever attempting that.
HW: So, what’s next and where to from here? How do you see this work fitting within the wider context of your practice and the work you are continuing to make about our changing city?
TV: Putting this little publication together has been an exercise in looking back in order to move forward. In that spirit, and at risk of writing yet another behemoth essay, I’ll recount a series of events as they unfolded during what seems a lifetime ago.
One night in 2004 — a ‘gap year’ between my Honours and Masters — I got home from my studio at around 5 a.m. I found a University of Canterbury envelope addressed to me on the kitchen bench of my flat. It looked like it had been there a while, as it was buried under a pile of old circulars and slightly yellowed copies of The Star suburban paper. Half-asleep, I opened it. It was from the Scholarships Office, offering ‘congratulations’. It went on to tell me I’d been awarded a travel grant to help extend my studies (The Ethel Susan Jones Fine Arts Travelling Scholarship, which both you and Mitchell Bright received some years later). I was to split that year’s scholarship pool with my good friend and contemporary, André Hemer.
A few months later, I found myself standing outside the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, Germany. During World War 2, the building, which is now used as a gallery of contemporary art, archaeology and cultural history, stood on the border of East and West Berlin. Navigating my way around the exterior of the building, I was shocked to see thousands of pockmarks from bullets marring the stonework. I was there to see a major retrospective exhibition by my hero, Cartier-Bresson. The exhibition banner hung over the main entrance. It was a picture taken in 1962 of three West-German men standing on a bollard, peering over the Wall towards a block of flats located in the East. I’d learn in the show that the men were communicating with someone who can only just be seen, blurry within the image’s background. Beyond rows of razor wire and concrete, this person leans through an apartment window. The Wall had only recently been built when the image was taken, so I imagine they might have been friends or family suddenly and forcibly located on different sides of the physical and ideological divide. But I digress…
I made my way inside, checked my bag in and paid my entrance fee, then proceeded to the exhibition. The atmosphere was unlike any museum or gallery I’d ever attended before or since. So quiet you could hear a pin drop, with many people silently shuffling from picture to picture, leaning into the modestly sized prints to scrutinise every square-inch of monochrome detail. All the famous images were represented — the print quality was sublime, save for some sloppy spotting work — but the tone of the room was overwhelmingly sombre. I stood in front of the famous ‘puddle jumper’ — the prototypical ‘decisive moment’ — and it was as if the joie de vivre had been entirely drained from it. The gallery just felt too oppressive. Well over one hundred virtuoso images hung in a neat straight line; moment after moment seen and represented with such overwhelming formal rigour that by the final picture, I felt thoroughly confused about what I was looking at. This was supposed to be my moment of epiphany, not an exercise in geometry and certainly not some solemn trudge!
Back down at the coat check, I collected my bag and out of obligation bought three exhibition posters from the gift-shop — one of which now hangs, framed, above my office desk. Trying hard to act in good humour, I asked the person behind the counter whether the gallery always felt so morbid. He quietly rolled my posters and secured them with two rubber bands, then told me I’d come on a sad day. Aged ninety-five, Cartier-Bresson had died that very morning. Stunned, I re-checked my bag, paid for another ticket and went straight back to the exhibition.
Miraculously, this time around the images brimmed with life. The mood of the entire gallery shifted with a change of my own sensitivity. This was the moment I truly became alert to the potential of images in a way that was previously purely intuitive: the depictive and connotative qualities of photographs as read discretely or in series were dictated by many factors beyond the edges of the images themselves, most importantly my own lived experience, imagination and knowledge.
To elaborate, for a long time before that moment in Berlin — since Glenn had shown me a tatty copy of Exiles in his office — I had identified with Koudelka’s famous black dog as the typical symbol of disenfranchisement and depression; the clichéd tortured artist-genius, all-consumed with his camera and, as Jack Kerouac said of Robert Frank’s approach, with ‘sucking the actual pink juice of human kind’. However, I had failed to consider an alternative reading, one of an expression of personal freedom, expansive horizons, possibility and even an embracing of the unknown within the everyday. Koudelka once stated, ‘I believe that truly creative periods are those when you live with intensity. If you lose intensity, you lose everything.’ That statement resonated strongly as I stood, re-experiencing Cartier-Bresson’s photos. I could see how he lived by that mantra and how it translated into his work during a long and varied life well lived. He’d been everywhere, photographed everything. He was uncompromising.
Yet I also recognised that Cartier-Bresson’s was not my path forward. After a mere three months away from New Zealand, I knew without a doubt I was not a good traveller. If I wasn’t interested in globe-trotting and the exotic, however, what then for me?
Later that evening, I sat alone in a bar opposite Bahnhof Zoo. With a massive mug of Becks beer on the table, I held a pen and small bunch of postcards, not unlike my friends, who had earlier composed letters to send me from abroad — those letters that irked me so much and triggered my obsession with making work using the local bus system. I wrote some rather embarrassing statements regarding life goals that evening, like that I’d become a member of Magnum Photos before turning thirty. At age forty-two, I’ve well and truly given up hope on that front.
I can’t blame the beer alone for falling into such clichés, and I don’t blame recipients thinking I’d ‘sold out’ and bought into the ‘travel changes everything’ mantra. However, one written declaration still holds true: I stated I’d return to Christchurch and attempt to make a real go of being a photographer. I imagined a lifetime of work to be made right there, at home and in a place I felt truly connected. To be a little reductive, I realised that until that point, I’d been making work mostly to prove things to other people and it was a process of forcing square pegs into round holes. Cartier-Bresson et al. made for marvellous square pegs, but it was crucial I find the measure of my own sides.
With regards to this, Robert Capa famously said that if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough. People often equate this with physical proximity — I know I certainly did — but sitting there in Berlin I realised he was actually speaking about mental proximity, primarily empathy, a sense of connectedness and commitment. It was time to abandon the combat photographer gig and buy a new, comfortable pair of walking shoes.
The final part of your question relates to the here and now, plus the where to from here. Since 2011, I have been photographing using large, cumbersome and some would argue totally impractical large format cameras. This is an antidote to working in the way I described above with my old Leica: a way to force a slow, methodical pace and not push my lens into people’s faces. I’ve been photographing Christchurch as it goes through rapid change as a result of the earthquakes, both within the central city and especially the eastern suburb of Avonside. For a few years, I’ve been feeling intensely fatigued by this. COVID hasn’t helped, especially watching businesses struggle and social spaces sit empty. To reference another Capa quote — this time from his self-aggrandising autobiography Slightly Out of Focus — it got to a point where I felt my work was more akin to that of a mortician than a photographer; that the many and very real forms of grief and trauma experienced by others as a result of the earthquakes weighed very heavily on my shoulders. Consequently, I’m going through a period of re-evaluating priorities, both within my work and more importantly on a personal level with family.
Right now, as a circuit breaker I’m making work about the Pūharakekenui Styx River as part of a residency hosted by the Styx Living Laboratory Trust. I’m using this time as an opportunity to experiment with tri-colour capture on monochrome film, which is essentially the same as the Technicolor motion picture process used for movies like The Wizard of Oz. I’m subverting it slightly, so the images have a more surreal colour palate and misaligned details that make the disjointed time it takes to capture each image very evident (I make three separate exposures through red, green and blue filters to create colour separations for each frame).
My favourite image so far is a panorama of the unassuming mouth of the river; a dry swale that snakes its way through Nunweek Park in front of a very strange, half-built Coptic Orthodox church. On the surface of things, the river looks like a dug-out trench; however, the land formation is completely natural. It took me two hours to photograph the scene I had previsualised plus many failed attempts before that. To have that time to revisit and contemplate things is such a luxury. It’s amazing what reveals itself to you if you take the time to stand still in one spot for that long. That’s what I’m enjoying the most at the moment — being present. No more running and gunning for me.
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Hannah Watkinson is a Visiting Lecturer in Photography at the Ilam School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury. Her recent publication, The Near Future (for purchase via Bad News Books), considers the psychological landscape of the Buller region. Drawing on an archive of work amassed over nearly a decade, the book explores key elements that make up the socio-political climate of the Westport area — coal and gold mining, cement production, the natural environment and climate change — and raises a number of fundamental questions about the future of this place.
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Red Bus Diary published by Hazard Press and the University of Canterbury College of Arts in conjunction with Place in Time: The Christchurch Documentary Project.
ISBN: 1-877393-21-5 (out of print)
Red Bus Diary was also exhibited at Centre of Contemporary Art, Christchurch, New Zealand, as part of Platform Arts Festival, 2006.