Sapeer Mayron interviews Mark Adams about his work and new book Mark Adams: A survey | He kohinga whakaahua for Sunday Star-Times:
‘The acclaimed photographer's career has been about building relationships and examining our colonial past. Whether he's succeeded is up to the audience, he tells Sapeer Mayron.
After more than 50 years chronicling Aotearoa on film, photographer Mark Adams' career is under the spotlight.
From photographing the Treaty of Waitangi signing sites for Te Papa alongside local kaumātua, to examining the legacy of James Cook through visiting the sites Cook visited, Adams' career has been spent focusing the lens on the coloniser, rather than the colonised.
"There's a whole history of photography in the Western canon... these are white guys photographing others," Adams told the Sunday Star-Times.
"This is tricky territory to work in. What I was trying to do was to undo what they did, to actually not be them but to point the colonial camera around 180 degrees, point it back at me, point it back at colonialism. Well, that's the intention. How successful that that's gonna be is up to the person, the viewer."'
Read the rest of the interview here.
