A landscape composed of automobiles

Motorised transport features in every frame of Derek Smith’s new book Roadscapes: An Automotive Retrospective of Aotearoa New Zealand. Cars, bikes, buses and trucks. Most of them still functioning parts of society, even if the function has become stationary. But the Kakanui-based photographer’s work is not fundamentally about them, rather they sit in the landscapes he is drawn to. “So, they’re not just pictures of cars. I mean, the cars are part of the element of the photograph, but they’re pictures of New Zealand, really, because my whole photography thing isn’t about cars. It’s about New Zealand,” he says. “It’s all about shapes, colours and compositions as much as it is anything else.” It is work in the tradition of Robin Morrison, here, or the “on the road” documentary photography of American Stephen Shore. Over the years Smith has also taken many, many photographs in which cars, or other forms of transport, have played no part. Some of them featured in an earlier book. “But these cars are obviously part of the social landscape, so I focused on this for this particular book,” he says of Roadscapes. The book’s images are a selection from more than 40 years of work, most of them taken while Smith worked as a meter reader — up and down and in all corners of the motu. “Most of my time as a meter reader, I was just trudging the streets with my eyes open — basically all the time,” he says. “That was the beauty about being a meter reader. It was that, to be honest, you could disengage from your actual role. “I mean, the meter reading required about 20 minutes a day, total, of concentration.” That was the cumulative brief periods of time reading and recording numbers. “And the rest of the time, yeah, the rest of the time, you could just do your own thing. And so I was just looking all the time, looking, looking, looking for colour relationships, looking for anything that might be interesting. “As a photographer, it was the perfect job. And I didn't have to rely on grants to keep me propped up. You know, I could actually pay my way.” It also feels useful, he says, to be taking what are documentary shots, recording our lived history for future generations. Smith has long had an interest in cars and bikes himself. His “journey” beginning with an FJ Holden panel van he saved from the wrecker’s yard, and early on involving the likes of a Norton 750 Combat Commando bike and a Ford F100 pickup. Transport that came with character. These days it’s a Singer Vogue. “It’s just sitting in the drive because I needed to put a new head gasket on it. And it's beautiful. I love it. “I love just seeing it sitting there in the driveway. It's nice. It's a nice bit of garden art.” It’ll be roadworthy again shortly. The head gasket blew going over the Lindis Pass. “You get that with an old vehicle. It's a 60-year-old car.” Many of the vehicles, the cars, the bikes, in his book are from a time when they made bolder statements about style and beauty. “These days I don't get terribly excited,” he says of modern models. “I still document them because I feel that they're part of the social landscape. I don't get inspired by the look of them. “I think they're designed, basically, to get tired of after a few years. Nobody buys them for their looks.” It’s part of the new millennium’s bland standardisation. “Our use of colour in the landscape, you know, has changed as well. And everything now, it’s so careful. It’s greys and it’s whites and it’s blacks and beige, and everything is sort of resale,” Smith says. “We can't be too excitable here because we can't sell it.” It’s another observation drawn from his long years walking the nation’s towns and cities as a meter reader. “Wellington was amazing,” he says of his time there. “It was like a big living art museum. Well, much like Dunedin is now, actually. “It was just full of colour, full of colour. The cars were colourful. The houses were colourful. “And now we're all sort of homogenised into this big world grind of blacks, greys, beiges — safe colours.” Given Roadscapes’ images were taken over almost 45 years, they also track the changes in camera technology. The earlier images were, of course, taken on film. “I used a big clunky old Mamiya 645 because that was the biggest camera I could get that was portable — the smallest I could get that was portable but had the big negatives and the 120 film and a decent lens. “That was an expensive thing to run. So, it took all my money — because meter reading doesn't pay very well. But, you know, photography and music were the only things I spent money on when I was young.” Digital photography changed the economics. Smith made the leap when working for the Southern Heritage Trust in the early 2000s. It bought an EOS 330D to document the Dunedin of the time. “And it was a relief too because, let's face it, it was cheap,” he says. “It doesn't mean you apply less discipline. “If you're taking a photograph, there has to be an intent. Well, I believe anyway. There has to be an intent behind your work. But it means you can make a few cock-ups and it doesn't cost you a lot of money.” That said, film maintains its exclusive quality, he says. “You can always tell when something's actually originated on film.” Derek SmithToyota Corolla, Oamaru, 2015. Toyota Corolla, Oamaru, 2015 It was the building that initially attracted Smith to his subject here. “I think, ‘ooh, that's an interesting building. How am I going to wrap a car around it?’. “And there just happens to be a car. I've got a lot of photographs of that building, you know, close-up ones of those broken windows, because they looked amazing. “That building's gone now. It went shortly after I took that photograph. “So, that's half the trick, is finding something that, like a lot of the buildings there, I think, ‘ooh, that's an amazing building’. I'll wait until I see a nice car in front of it one day and take a photo of it. “And hopefully people will notice the building behind, because often people — and probably will be with this book — they'll look at the car and that's where they'll kind of respond to the picture. But I hope that a lot of people will appreciate the content of the image, as well as the car. “Because, there's a colour sensibility at work there. There's a compositional thing happening. There's a lot of what I injected into the picture, into the image. “So, I hope that it gets appreciated on that level too, you know, rather than just the vehicle.” Derek SmithRiley Elf, Alma, 2018. Riley Elf, Alma, 2018 “It’s not just a picture of the car, it’s a picture. My philosophy with taking the picture is that the whole thing has to be as deliberate as a painting. Everything within that rectangle has to be, you have to be aware of it. “It has to relate to everything else within that rectangle. “So, it's the colour associations, the composition, the balance. The balance of the picture is important. “The photographers that I've been inspired by, they're not just documenting stuff. They're making interesting images, single images out of what they're documenting. “There was an American photographer called Stephen Shore who used a big 10x8 camera and he just hauled himself and his gear around America in the ’70s. “That's about 10 bucks a shot every time you push the button in those days. And his photographs are amazing. “Every little part of that image was disciplined. You know what I mean? Everything was intentional. “And that was the philosophy I wanted to take into this sort of photography too, is that everything's intentional. The relationship of colours, the sign writing. I love handwritten signs. “That was part of the Alma shot as well. Fruit stalls are great because you get lots of handwritten signs and stuff like that. “I'm pretty undisciplined in just about every other aspect of my life. And so I thought, ‘oh, I should really apply a bit of discipline to this’.”