SHOOTING from the lip
A photographic exhibition showcasing news images from the past two years has opened in Auckland. Herald visual journalists Michael Craig and Dean Purcell talk to Kim Knight about life behind the lens.
Of course they’re backlit. Two photographers, silhouetted against the giant glass windows of a giant New Zealand media company, waiting for this interview and their coffees.
“We put our prey in the light,” says Michael Craig. Is he joking? Photographers are all about the light.
He’ll take the flat white, thanks. Dean Purcell has ordered a hot chocolate, which is perhaps the exact opposite of what you’d imagine him drinking, after you hear him say: “I remember mentoring a photographer a few years ago and he was new to the game and we went to court. Just the usual — a guy comes out of court . . . he’s a naughty boy, you photograph him — and he spat in my face. This other photographer just freaked out. He couldn’t handle it. And I said, ‘Well, at least he didn’t punch me’.”
Michael Craig: “I find that worse than being physically attacked. It’s more intimate. It’s a disgusting thing.”
Craig, 52, and Purcell, 48, are news photographers — Auckland-based visual journalists with NZME, the company that produces the New Zealand Herald. Their work appears online, in newspapers around the country and, until June 12, at the Auckland Festival of Photography. Disruption — New Zealand Herald Visual Journalists (in Silo 6 at Wynyard Quarter) showcases some of the thousands of images shot over two years of upheaval — from Covid lockdowns and protests, to floods and droughts.
In March 2020, when New Zealand entered a level 4 lockdown and Government ordered citizens to stay home and save lives, media qualified as “essential workers”.
News photographers hit the streets — history could not be recorded from the sofa.
Purcell: “Especially during the first lockdown, when we were told we were all going to die, I remember going to one of the pool cars and Michael had these bottles of hand sanitiser and he’d written “Covid killer” on them. We were literally spraying ourselves down every time we got out of the car, fully disinfecting everything — our gear, the car keys, the door handle, every time we went out there.”
Craig: “It was unnerving and it was stressful. At the end of the day, when I came home, I’d take all my clothes off in my partner’s studio, because we just didn’t know what was safe. But, at the same time, while terrible things were happening around the world, in New Zealand, there was almost an excitement. It was unusual, history was being made. And the weather was fantastic, and the roads were empty.
“I remember thinking this is really interesting — and terrible — all at the same time.”
The Disruption exhibition features New Zealand Herald published work from photographers based around the country, including Alex Burton, George Heard, Mark Mitchell, Jason Oxenham, Brett Phibbs, Mike Scott and Sylvie Whinray. A looped showreel (with interviews) will screen continuously at Silo Park and more images will be displayed in the NZME head office foyer and on an outdoor billboard on Victoria St West.
The images selected run the gamut — from extreme weather events, to Covid, to the oddities of daily life in a time of disruption.
As Covid escalated and vaccine mandates were introduced, media around the country experienced increased hostility — but, as Purcell and Craig note, people have always loved to hate a news photographer.
Craig: “I have friends who are media-literate and savvy, but if I tell them we’ve been to somebody’s house to knock on their door to ask about a dead relative, they are completely shocked — yet they read a newspaper article about that death.
A reporter I work with, Cherie Howie, says ‘Nobody wants to see how the sausage is made’ — but everybody likes sausages.”
Purcell: “I don’t think people get what we do. They don’t really think about what goes into it.”
He recalls a police chase that ended with a car wrapped around a tree. The teenage occupants died, and Purcell photographed the scene.
“This woman was standing beside me, just going off. I just said, politely, ‘I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have to be. I’m here because it’s my job — what’s your excuse?’ Do we have a licence to be vultures? Maybe we do.”
Sometimes, says Craig, a photographer is simply a recorder. Other times, he’s looking to tell a story less literally; to really drill down into a subject. But, regardless of public criticism, “if they didn’t want us there, if they weren’t reading those stories and looking at those pictures, we probably wouldn’t be there”.
Earlier this year, Craig was taking generic shots in Papatoetoe when a woman flung herself into his open car window and scratched his face, requiring a trip to hospital for tetanus shots and a week in home isolation because of the Covid risk; Purcell was photographing a flood clean-up in Kumeu¯ when a man came at him with a broom. Stress? Mental health issues? They shrug. A camera, they say, makes you stick out.
Purcell: “You hear, ‘Anyone can take a photo now’. And with digital cameras and technology, that’s true. People ask what’s the difference between what they can do on their phone and what I do? When a patched gang member is outside court and they want to punch your head in, I want to see how good your photos are then. Ninety per cent of our job is just getting to that point of physically pushing the button on the camera.”
Craig: “There can be high pressure and nervousness, but you’ve got to be able to control that because the job we do is technically quite difficult. There’s a lot to be thinking about, a lot of maths going on. At the same time as being in a stressful situation, you’re thinking about exposure, composition, lighting . . . ”
In 2008, Auckland man Austin Hemmings was stabbed when he came to the aid of a woman he didn’t know. The good Samaritan had just left work when he was killed on
Auckland’s Mills Lane, very close to the Herald’s office at the time. Purcell’s front page photographs divided talkback radio — he was a parasite; he was just doing his job.
Purcell: “He’d lost a lot of blood, and it trickled down these nice clean cobblestones. I used to have to walk up the lane from the train station every morning. Of course they’d cleaned it and sprayed it down, but I could still see the outlines of the blood, even after hundreds of thousands of people had walked there. It took about a year before those bloodstains disappeared.”
He tells that story in response to the question: Have you cried on the job? “No,” says Purcell. “But some jobs stay with you.”
Craig: “I shed tears for things I see in the media regularly, but never for a job I’ve been working on. You’re somehow slightly removed from it.
“I remember just before the first lockdown seeing footage of Italians singing to each other from their balconies — people, desperate to communicate. That brought a tear to my eye. But when you’re involved with the story yourself, you tend to be a little more stoic, I guess.”
Purcell studied photography at Unitech. His classmates wanted to be fashion photographers, but when the Howick and Pakuranga Times placed an advertisement calling for freelancers, he applied. His first official job was photographing the Governor-General giving out an award at Tāmaki College.
“I just caught the bug. I get to go out with my camera every day and record events and history and get paid?”
Craig, who studied photojournalism in the UK, describes the job as a privilege.
“People let you into their lives, organisations let you in and — most days — you can experience something different every day.”
During Auckland’s long Covid lockdowns, it was a challenge to find new ways to shoot a never-ending story (another day, another testing station queue). Vaccine mandates, and the protests that followed, changed the mood on the street. Craig points to a photograph he took at one of Destiny Church’s first outdoor services. In the centre of the shot, is a young boy running and smiling. The scene is calm and happy.
“And it went from that kind of atmosphere to, in a very short space of time, where you’d get one foot out of the car and a security guard would be in your face. It went from what you see in that photograph to an incredible level of aggression. From nought to 100, and it felt like that happened overnight.”
Purcell: “They used tactics that were very different. They wouldn’t hit or push, but they would get in your face. You’d get a massive bear hug from someone who was unmasked and probably unvaccinated. They used pots and pans to slam into your ears to try and make you go deaf, and they’d mob you to the point where you just couldn’t do anything and then just hurl verbal abuse — ‘Why are you doing this? How can you sleep at night?’”
Aggression came from unexpected quarters, says Craig.
“What was scary or unnerving towards the end was where the violence and the threats came from
. . . sometimes it came from American housewives. It came from a lot of women and old ladies. You have a radar for problems and it’s focused this way, and then all of a sudden a little old lady is coming at you? I didn’t know how to deal with that.”
Purcell: “The most hostile situations generally came from the people you’d least expect . . . ” And now?
Purcell: “It’s getting better out there. People are starting to get back to normal.”
Craig: “Crime is coming back . . . ” Purcell: “Ram raids and drive-bys. All the fun stuff !”