Hats off for top picture
With perfect camera timing Barry Durrant captured a blast from the past that won him a major award and ongoing accolades.
His photo ‘‘Hats Off at Hole Through’’ was taken during the official ceremony to mark the breakthrough of the Manapouri tunnel in October 1968.
On that day, Durrant had taken leave from his job on The Dominion and was freelancing for an engineering company involved in the project .
Gathered in the granite tunnel 200m beneath Lake Manapouri in Fiordland National Park were dignitaries, including staff from the engineering company and then justice minister Ralph Hanan, who had the honour of detonating the explosion.
Among the bustle of hard-hatted men, Durrant was poised, camera focused on the people. ‘‘I was after the expression on their faces. When there is a blast, a shockwave comes through the tunnel and it is a surprise for people, so I thought I would get their faces,’’ the 82-year-old says.
‘‘It was meant to be low-key but it was a massive blast and the lights went out, and the shockwave of the blast blew their hats off, then these pebbles began raining down.
‘‘I saw one flash and that was mine but I did not know what I had until I developed the film in the darkroom. When I saw what I had got, I went yahoo!’’
It was a year of big events. Durrant was working on April 10, 1968, the day of the Wahine disaster in Wellington Harbour. He was waiting on the beach at Seatoun when the first lifeboat came ashore and his picture of that moment ran across the front page of The Dominion – and was published around the world. The ferry sinking claimed 53 lives.
The following month, Durrant covered the Inangahua earthquake, 40km east of Westport. Three people died in the quake, which measured 7.1 on the Richter scale.
But it was the Hats Off photo that won him the top news picture that year at the Dulux Awards. When comedian, historian and environmentalist Te Radar came across the image he was blown away.
‘‘I think it is the greatest photograph in the history of New Zealand photography,’’ he says. ‘‘He [Durrant] was looking exactly the right way at exactly the right time and a second either way that photo would not have existed.’’
■ Hats Off at Hole Through is among more than 120 photojournalism images up for auction in New Plymouth on September 24 to raise money for Hospice Taranaki.
The idea for the fundraiser came from veteran photojournalist Rob Tucker, who has terminal cancer and is under hospice care.