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| Poor design and lighting, and lack of captions for 'Tom Hutchins: A New Zealander in China 1956' exhibition at PhotoBeijing 2018. (Photograph by John B Turner: JBT©20181020-047) |
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| Poor design and lighting, and lack of captions for 'Tom Hutchins: A New Zealander in China 1956' exhibition at PhotoBeijing 2018. (Photograph by John B Turner: JBT©20181021-113) |
"I admire the intentions and scope, and the sheer ambition of this important showcase of world photography, but despite all my efforts and those of the staff who have helped me, the poor display of the carefully made modern prints of Hutchins photographs made in the summer of 1956 has changed the exhibition from a celebration to a virtual insult to the world-class photographer who died before he knew how much experts in Chinese photography and history appreciated his work," Turner, who curated the exhibition of 30 pictures especially for PhotoBeijing said.
"It has taken nearly 30 years to make Hutchins photographs available for exhibition, publication and sale - thousands of hours of unpaid work - Auckland university research grants from New Zealand, and the moral support of many photographers, editors and academics in China and the international art community to bring this exhibition to fruition", Turner says. Turner taught photography in New Zealand for 40 years before retiring and coming to live in Beijing to further his research and promotion of his former colleague and mentor's China essay which was almost lost until he rediscovered it in ruins in 1979.
"Tom's photographs need to be seen in China," Turner says, "because they are of and about China at a unique period of China's turbulent history. If he had been a Chinese photographer, it is not likely that his work would have been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution when many of the contacts and friends he made in 1956 were badly treated."
"I could have just shown Tom's work in New Zealand and left it at that", the curator, who is also a co-editor of PhotoForum magazine, pointed out. "But that would be like having an outstanding Chinese photographer work in New Zealand at an important time of change, but never showing those pictures to New Zealanders."
Tom Hutchins was also a pioneer in photographic education and started teaching photography at the University of Auckland in 1965 - the first academic courses in photography and film in the British Commonwealth, and that aspect of his career is the subject of Turner's lecture as part of the Silk Road Youth Photography Forum at Sanlitun Primary School, Chaoyang District on 22 October, organised by Zhongyi Online Education for PhotoBeijing.
"I will continue my mission to share Tom's outstanding photographs of China because they deserve recognition, no matter how late, besides the work of famous foreign photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Mark Riboud, Brian Brake (another New Zealander), Rene Burri, Eve Arnold and others who visited China in the 1950s and 1960s. But following the international debut of his work at the Pingyao photography festival in 2016, it is extremely disappointing to see his work presented so poorly and hidden in the dungeon at the fabulous China Millenial Monument on this occasion."
"Sadly, his is not the only work ruined by inadequate lighting or misguided design. Even worse, it is a blot on the magnificent work done by a long list of expert advisors and the hardworking staff and volunteers at PhotoBeijing who are doing so much to bring China's successes to international notice."
"That hurts", Turner says, "because it gives the wrong impression that China doesn't care about serious art research and quality - when the opposite is true."
"China has thousands of world-class photographers and knows that it still has much to do in the areas of public and private collecting, quality control and preservation of historical photography. These are among the admirable and necessary aims of PhotoBeijing, but quality control must be expended on every aspect with respect for the intrinsic value utmost. It saddens me to see this lost opportunity but despite my criticism, some of the foreign curators have indicated that they would like to showcase Tom Hutchins' China photographs in their countries. I can't complain about that."
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More background information:
PRESS RELEASE, BEIJING, CHINA, 5 OCTOBER 2018
Pioneer New Zealand photojournalist and film and photography educator recognized in China.
Photographs by the late Robert (Tom) Hutchins (1921-2007) will feature at PhotoBeijing from 20 to 29 October 2018, along with a lecture recognizing his role as a pioneer in photographic education in New Zealand, to be given by a former colleague, as a part of the Silk Road Youth Photography Forum.
Hutchins, who is best known as an influential teacher at the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts, where he worked from 1965 to 1980, set up the first full-time academic courses in Photography and Film in the British Commonwealth. Like Rodney Charters and Darcy Lange, some of his students made their name in film or video, while numerous others, like Clive Bartleet, Clive Stone, and Beverley Austin became leaders in teaching photography in secondary schools throughout New Zealand.
Hutchins’ students Megan Jenkinson and Anne Noble became distinguished academics and many others, including Murray Cammick, Fiona Clark, Brian Donovan, and Ian Macdonald rose to prominence as independent photographers in different fields: Cammick as the founding music editor of Rip It Up, Donovan as an Auckland University photographer; Macdonald as a leading conservationist and founder of Real Pictures laboratory and art gallery. A retrospective of Clark’s work was recently shown at Auckland’s Art Space.
As John B Turner, who was invited to join Hutchins to teach photography from 1971, will outline in his lecture to the Silk Road Youth Photographic Forum of PhotoBejing on 22 October, Hutchins was a remarkable and demanding teacher and visionary who made photography and film central to art education in New Zealand.
What is less known, because he seldom talked about his own career as a photographer and filmmaker, is that he was, previous to teaching, an accomplished photojournalist. As a freelance photographer, he became a member of the prestigious Black Star picture agency of New York, USA, and Life magazine’s South Pacific stringer. According to Turner, the single most important assignment of Hutchins’ career as a photographer was his unique four and a half month coverage of China in the summer of 1956; 30 pictures of which, selected from more than 6,000 will debut at PhotoBeijing.
Hutchins was Chief Photographer on the Auckland Star newspaper in the mid-1950s, when given the choice of keeping his job or going to China in 1956, he chose the latter. A committed Socialist, he wanted to see for himself what was going on in the seventh year of Communist rule. As he wrote on his arrival from Hong Kong and made his first photographs on 9 May 1956, ‘I secretly celebrate this first success in doing what I had come to China for—photographing in my own way and on my own terms these people who number a quarter of mankind.’
A small portion of his essay was published in the Life international issue on 7 February 1957 under the title of ‘Red China on the Move’. Perhaps begrudgingly, because the magazine’s US nationals were forbidden to visit China by their own government. Hutchins had 600 prints made of his favorite images, but unable to find a publisher who was not scared by the anti-communist movement in the West, he lost interest and his work towards a book rotted under his house until located, too late to save most of them, by Turner in 1989 who has since worked to recreate, preserve and promote this work of international importance which captures a slice of life during perhaps the most optimistic early year of the Chinese Revolution before the ‘Let 100 Flowers Bloom’ movement reversed direction.
CONTACT FOR MORE INFORMATION OR ILLUSTRATIONS:
SAMPLE PHOTOGRAPHS FROM EXHIBITION ‘Tom Hutchins: A New Zealander in China, 1956’
Permission for one-time use to reproduce these photographs is given subject to the pictures not being cropped and titled factually as given below and properly credited. Copyright belongs to Tom Hutchins Images Ltd, PO Box 1345, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand, with permission of use granted to John B Turner, Projects Manager. johnbturner2009@gmail.com
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| Unidentified photographer©Tom Hutchins on Great Wall of China, Peking, China 1956 (detail) |
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| Tom Hutchins©Kids on rooftop No.5 Middle School, Peking skyline, China 1956 |
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| Tom Hutchins©Laying railway tracks, Gobi Desert, Kansu, China 1956 |
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| Tom Hutchins©Junks under the new Yangtze River Bridge at Hankow (Hangzhou), China 1956 |
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| Tom Hutchins©_Musician's wife in her garden, Peking, China 1956 |
Permission for one-time use to reproduce these photographs is given subject to the pictures not being cropped and titled factually as given below and properly credited. Copyright belongs to Tom Hutchins Images Ltd, New Zealand, with permission of use granted to John B Turner, Projects Manager. johnbturner2009@gmail.com
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