A pub in close-up
CLOSING TIME: PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE HOTEL KIWI 1967-75 by Gary Baigent, John Fields and Max Oettli (Rim Books, $40)
The Kiwi Hotel, on the corner of Symonds St and Wellesley St, was never going to be the sort of architecture that anyone would ever preserve. It was a squat and featureless building. Even the 1967 Pub-goer’s Guidebook could only describe it has having “a general lavatorial atmosphere”, that it was “built almost entirely of Formica and rubberised floor-tiles” and “represents all that a pub should not be”.
Despite this, as a consequence of its location near the University of Auckland and the Elam School of Fine Arts, the Kiwi was one of Auckland’s most notable pubs of its generation. While catering primarily to students and what could loosely be called “bohemia”, its location meant that it was also the resort of working men and women. The bartenders were known by name. Weekends were busy.
Rim Books’ collection, Closing Time: photographs from the Hotel Kiwi 196775, memorialises the venue as recorded through the eyes and words of some of New Zealand’s most notable photographers in their youth — Gary Baigent, the late John Fields, and Max Oettli, all of whom were patrons of the pub themselves. It is an important cultural record and a fascinating book of images.
The artist Colin Mccahon is caught deep in an afternoon conversation with student Ted Spring, flanked by Lion Red bottles. Young women with high, bouffant hairstyles sit together while a guitar is being strummed. Painter Harry Wong is captured in debate with the gallerist Rodney Kirk Smith. Samantha Groves reads a copy of a newspaper with a headline about Scientology at the same table as the communist Graeme Wimp and surrounded by empty beer jugs.
Baigent, Fields, and Oettli were part of a new realism that had come to the fore in this period of New Zealand photography. Building on the performance of lightweight cameras — the Nikon and the Leica — and fast film, the techniques of press-photography were repurposed to new ends. New Zealand was suddenly seen through fresh eyes, beginning with Baigent’s 1967 book The Unseen City: 123 photographs of Auckland, with its highcontrast grainy images of streets, bars, and backyards. Fields was an American with vast photographic experience whose Photography: A visual dialect collected the work of 10 contemporary New Zealand photographers in 1970. Then Hamilton-raised Oettli became the founding president of the Photoforum group, and was one of New Zealand’s most notable street photographers, snatching images at busy pedestrian crossings, on escalators, and in crowds. Flanked by short evocative essays or diary excerpts from Spring, Baigent, Fields, Oettli and Elizabeth Eastmond, the images in the 56-page limited-edition Closing Time are indispensable, both as history and as a record of New Zealand life. With its high production values, the book repays repeated examination by revealing ever more detail. It engages the eye and captures the mind. Auckland’s past is opened up again to the present.