I Must Be Dreaming

The books of pho­to­grapher and artist Bruce Connew.

By Ham­ish Thompson

I Must Behave by Bruce Con­new. Book design by Cath­er­ine Griffiths.

“When people look at my pic­tures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.” 
— Robert Frank, LIFE (26 Novem­ber 1951)

This com­ment from Robert Frank, the pho­to­grapher whose book The Amer­ic­ans turned pho­to­graphy and a cul­ture on its head in the middle of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, comes to mind when I look across the breadth of Bruce Connew’s pub­lished work. His earli­est book fol­lows in the tra­di­tion of book-based doc­u­ment­ary work estab­lished by Frank and oth­ers like Gary Wino­grad. South Africa (1987) sets up the sub­ject with an expans­ive essay (40,000 words), fol­lowed by uncropped 35mm black and white pho­to­graphs, which have been edited into a sequence that provides its own rhythm and ulti­mately mean­ing.
Since team­ing up with designer Cath­er­ine Grif­fiths (they live and work together), Connew’s books have evolved into a design sequence of their own. While each tells an indi­vidual story, the most recent have become objets d’art them­selves, cel­eb­rat­ing the aes­thet­ics of page design, size, mater­i­als and print­ing and bind­ing style. This is the work of Vapour Momenta Books: an at-times extraordin­ar­ily rich pro­cess show­ing what can hap­pen when pho­to­grapher and graphic designer truly col­lab­or­ate.
Connew’s doc­u­ment­ary spe­ci­al­ity, 35mm avail­able light pho­to­graphy, reveals his bent and expert­ise, as a fun­da­ment­ally human­ist pho­to­grapher – focus­ing on the aver­age per­son and their every­day exper­i­ences. Over the years his work has evolved from pho­to­journ­al­ism to art pho­to­graphy – mov­ing from the ‘found’ photo to images (and books) that have been cre­ated to ful­fil the cre­at­ive vis­ion of the artist.

On the road to an ambush
In 1989, Con­new spent five weeks in Burma, observing the Karen people’s war with Burmese gov­ern­ment troops. The book was pub­lished in 1999. It’s not a sub­ject likely to push a book to the top of the best­seller list: “One cru­cial theme is the capri­cious­ness of death, includ­ing the untimely death of my wife,” says the pho­to­grapher.
“Because the book mixes genres it com­pletely con­fused review­ers, pub­lish­ers and book­shops. Where do you put it – photography/history/biography? It includes all of those.” Con­new wanted to make a book that people would sit read­ing, rather than just look at – this informed the choice of format, pur­pose­fully smal­ler than the stand­ard pho­to­graphic book.
The mak­ing of Ambush fol­lowed what is now the couple’s stand­ard modus operandi: Con­new developed the text and a sequence of images, let­ters and eph­em­era, then put a rub­ber band around it and handed it to Grif­fiths to design. He then went off to India for three weeks with his daugh­ter, return­ing to a 98% fin­ished lay­out. He says present­ing a com­plete book concept is easier for a pub­lisher than an odd out­line such as, “Ah, it will have 50 pho­tos, some text I’ll write, faxes, let­ters and a few items I’ve collected…”

On the Way to an Ambush, by Bruce Connew.

Mut­ton­birds – part of a story
“This was inten­ded as a polit­ical book … about those who have or have not the right, through whakapapa, to col­lect mut­ton­birds. The point of the book, work­ing with a bene­fi­cial owner of Tau­ki­hepa, a mut­ton­birder, was to make this issue pub­lic.
“ In one breath, it is about the beauty of these extraordin­ary migrat­ory birds, and the pho­to­graphs show that. In another breath, it is about a fam­ily who have seen their right to col­lect mut­ton­birds side­lined. So, the book, 
the pho­to­graphs and the oral his­tory with Dean Tiemi Te Au, was con­struc­ted to help begin a pro­cess of redemp­tion for the fam­ily, and in part to assist in the pro­cess of res­ol­u­tion of the issue."
Des­pite his overtly polit­ical inten­tion, Con­new wanted this book to feel like an artist’s cre­ation, not the work of a pamph­let­eer – as Vic­toria Uni­ver­sity Press’ Fer­gus Bar­row­man describes it, “a bomb in plain wrap­ping”. Grif­fiths' use of French fold­ing, wire bind­ing and brown paper provided just the under­stated tone he wanted: low-key, almost blue col­lar.
Grif­fiths says the choice of brush cal­li­graphy for the cover of Mut­ton­birds was instinct­ive. It was then a happy design acci­dent that the words actu­ally looked like birds, fly­ing in on the front, fly­ing away on the back, migratory.

Mut­ton­birds, by Bruce Connew

Stop­over
This time Connew’s focus was a small Indian-Fijian sugar cane set­tle­ment. The Stop­over pho­to­graphs came out of seven vis­its to Vatiyaka over three-and-a-half years. They set an exten­ded fam­ily at the heart of a story about migra­tion, and are sup­por­ted by his nar­rat­ive cap­tions and a fic­tional story by Brij V Lal.
Con­new and Grif­fiths chose to have Stop­over prin­ted in Italy, by Edit­or­iale Bortolazzi-Stei (EBS). This Verona-based printer is known for its duo­tone pro­duc­tion, which involves mix­ing the gloss into the ink rather than lay­ing it over the top of images. Afi­cion­ados con­sider this gives the images greater lumin­os­ity, with a more roun­ded feel, like “the dif­fer­ence between vinyl record and a CD”, says Con­new.
Grif­fiths’ cover design is all restrained eleg­ance. She res­isted the pho­to­graphic images, and instead illus­trated migra­tion with typo­graphic ele­ments: the back cover’s dots – “spots on the world”, points of arrival and depar­ture – are in fact a mir­ror image of the filled-in Os of the title on the front cover.

Stop­over, prin­ted in Italy by Edit­or­iale Bortolazzi-Stei.

I Saw You…
By the end of Stop­over, Con­new was already look­ing to change his real­ist doc­u­ment­ary approach. His next work was still the res­ult of hours spent with his cam­era, but this time oper­at­ing in quite a dif­fer­ent mode. I Saw You… is planned as the first of a tri­logy examin­ing socio-political themes – in this case, sur­veil­lance.
“For twelve months, from the top floor of home, veiled behind an apron of black vel­vet, through double-glazing and a long lens, I pho­to­graphed the com­ings and goings of a car park in Balaena Bay – an ample piece of reclaimed Wel­ling­ton land that juts out into 
a bay, a fam­ily beach to one side.”
The book’s images are tiny por­tions of cropped 35mm pho­to­graphs 
(slightly Pho­toShopped) placed on the page 
in pro­por­tions that sug­gest Polar­oid prints. “These,” he says: “can be read as sweet, paint­erly images, but there’s often an uncom­fort­able twist… they can be a little creepy… peer­ing in, unob­served, on people’s private space.”
A CD was developed out of the book and sold sep­ar­ately, fea­tur­ing a Quick­time movie of the image sequence, with music by Alfredo Ibarra.

I Saw You, by Bruce Connew.

Must Behave
This is the second book in the tri­logy. It extends Connew’s exam­in­a­tion of con­trol, from uncom­plic­ated self-restraint to art­ful gov­ern­ment manœuvre, and how it mod­i­fies beha­viour, “what human nature might really involve”.
The book itself defies con­ven­tions. It has no text, no cap­tions, no page num­bers. The format is sim­ilar to Stop­over, and it was also prin­ted by EBS in Italy – “lus­cious yet mod­est”.
Grif­fiths says its cover design exem­pli­fies her aim to always respond in fresh ways to Connew's con­tent. Using typo­graphy provides an oppor­tun­ity to “add fur­ther to the lay­ers of mean­ing inside the book, not to alter or avert, but to sup­port Bruce’s telling”.
She enjoys the dir­ect affect of this book’s cover: “Throw­ing the title up on its side imme­di­ately causes a beha­vi­oural response… when you watch read­ers take the book, most turn it side­ways for a lit­eral read… I find that very inter­est­ing”.
Con­new iden­ti­fies a con­tinu­ity in his work, from South Africa, where his cam­era and mind focused on aspects of human nature thrown up by apartheid, through to I Must Behave, which looks more broadly across his reg­u­lar sub­ject of human nature”.
He’s unsure yet of the sub­ject of the final book in his tri­logy – per­haps he might turn the artist-photographer’s gaze on him­self and 
his past, he says. Wherever that mind aims, it will be a chal­len­ging, evoc­at­ive pub­lic­a­tion that presents the res­ult – that much is certain.

A spread from I Must Behave

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