Looking East from the house was a view over protruding hilltops from cloud shrouded valleys that stretched far in the distance to a range of snow capped mountains on the central plateau of the North Island of New Zealand. One of them was still an active volcano and little puffs of smoke could be seen arising from Mt Ngauruhoe. To the West was the near perfect peak of Mt Egmont, now called Mt Taranaki, it seemed only a few fields away and loomed large often with a little capped cloud that was a clear sign of rain the following day.
During winter we as a family would travel North on holidays, before the cows had new calves and the landscapes of Mt Messenger and the Awakino Gorge were imprinted on my impressionable mind. I often imagined films being made here, well before any films ever were made in NZ. Though it all seems idyllic I spent most nights of my boyhood twiddling the knobs of the radio trying to find a station playing rock and roll and looking longingly at the glow of the lights in the distance of the nearest town. I wanted to live in some city.
I have lived mostly in various cities since, and for me it has been the bigger the better, I love the visual stimulation, the architecture, the way we aestheticise our landscape and our homes, the convenience of art galleried and book shops etc and just the busyness, the constant stream of humanity. In contrast the hills of Taranaki seemed a lonely place to live.
But I still remember what it was like to awake with the sound of nearby magpies and the sound of larks on a summers day, plus those landscapes now just seem to be a part of my DNA. I can’t live anywhere now and be completely satisfied. Maybe I just wait for that perfect city, the new Jerusalem.
In the meantime I guess I will always be photographing those rural landscapes to fulfill some inner need and respond too to those urban themes that I find so stimulating and interesting. Below are five landscape photos I took a week ago, while staying up north on the coast.
