Review: Power of three
SUNDAY , 15 FEBRUARY 2004
How did photographer Andris Apse persuade Keri Hulme to put pen to paper for his new book? KIM KNIGHT reports on the extraordinary tale of three friends, their art and their passion for Fiordland.
This is a tale of three books and many makers. Of old friends and long dreams. Of whiskey, wine and fine words. Of a kauri table set under a pounamu wall in a small settlement on the West Coast of the South Island. And of sandflies - lots of sandflies.
Andris Apse reaches into a sheaf of images. The one he selects took nearly a fortnight to achieve, 10 days of waiting for the soft light and mist to fall together while the photographer stood statue-still in a boat on the velvet water.
"I was eaten alive by sandflies. I couldn't move because the boat would make a ripple, my arms were black, my face was black. You have to be so self-controlled, knowing there are 1000 sandflies sucking your blood."
There are words aplenty around this table. But it's the pictures that tell the story. Sixty images of Fiordland shot over 30 years, printed and about to be bound into three volumes worth $3000 a set. Photographs by Apse. Design by Guy Pask. Printing by Jim Clayden. Words by Apse, Andy Dennis and Keri Hulme.
It has taken Apse more than 300 nights alone in the wilderness to get these pictures. The finished project, 1000 hand-bound sets of books, has an estimated price tag of $1 million. Apse doesn't care if he doesn't sell a page.
"Everything we've done has been regardless of cost so far."
Here in Okarito, on the verge of the Tasman Sea, half an hour from the ice carpets of Franz Josef Glacier, the wordsmiths and photographer share plates of venison, whitebait and paua. It's raining silver pockmarks on the lagoon and there are fresh cherries for dessert.
Rewind this day, frame by frame. See them snug against the wooden boatshed telling bawdy jokes. They offer an arm to Hulme, who climbs aboard the runabout despite the small bone she broke in her foot on New Year's Eve. If there are serious moments, they dissolve in the salt-spray and fading sun. Andy plays Kate Winslet la Titanic; Andris takes off his shorts ("Oh, you meant remove the jacket"); Keri is on the beach, laughing.
"The place brings you gifts," she says of Okarito. "And they're strange gifts. One of the strange gifts was Andris and his wonderful obsession with Fiordland."
Hulme has supplied one of the essays for the trio of Fiordland books. Her treatise, "Te rua o te moko, a Maori perspective", came with a note asking her neighbour to accept her words as koha - there would be no charge.
It's been 18 years since she won the Booker Prize with the bone people, and there is no release date yet for the much-touted Bait. There has been text for photographer Robin Morrison's Homeplaces, the short story collection Te Kaihau/The Windeater, two books of poetry (Lost Possessions and Strands), a libretto called Ahua, a Story of Moki and, last December, a contribution to a scientific paper.
The Fiordland books, she confirms, will put her work back into a major publication. She has provided roughly 4500 words worth of traditional stories and discussion about the place where "wild weather and mists keep secrets safe".
"But the major part of it is Andris's work."
How did he succeed while other publishers wait?
"There are people who don't have as long on earth as the time he has spent down there making a record of grandeur," says Hulme. "I'm a beach person, but I looked at these photographs and I thought, OThese are works of genius'. I am very grateful to be part of this. This is a book that will last and last and last. It seems just vile to ask for money for it. Much better to give it as a gift."
New Zealanders, she says, understand passion for place. "Do you want to know Hulme's weird theory number two? It's that we actually worship our landscape. We literally worship this land."
She says Apse's work is a "celebration of places still pretty well untouched. It's ancient, it's unfathomable by any one person and all you can do is look at the pictures and think, aaah."
Plus, says Hulme, she's susceptible to bribery - fresh bread, home cooking and a small fishy delicacy called smoked riga sprats.
Tonight, there's salmon to go with the pre-dinner bubbly. Apse's partner, Lynne Bond, caught the fish that lies in elegant slabs. The couple bought this section at the end of the Okarito road sight unseen, and rebuilt the house on the hill. Spend a few hours learning how meticulously Apse plans a picture and the over-the-phone purchase is hard to believe.
He loves the West Coast, but Fiordland "is my corner of the world. It's something I really fell in love with donkeys years ago and I feel it hasn't really been portrayed the way I want to portray it."
If this project feels like a luxurious indulgence, it is one that's been a long time coming. In 1969, when Apse opened a photography shop in Rangiora, he put landscapes in the window. Nobody came.
"I realised to make money I had to take passports and babies and weddings and portraits. A lot of young photographers think you can just walk into this situation. When I was first married, we had apple boxes; we had $50 worth of furniture in our house for 10 years.
"You've got to have a goal, a target. It's the ones who are rudderless, that don't know where they're going, they end up not being anywhere."
Shared dreams have even more direction. The young photographer met a young printer. "Jim said, OOne day we'll do a book together. You choose the subject.' I knew then it would be Fiordland.
"Then he got cancer and he rang up one day and said I want to see this before I go, so he sort of stirred it up. But I've always been working towards it."
The pages that lie on the slate floor cost $3 each to produce. Apse pokes the precious proofs with his toe. "I'd like to think this is what it looked like 500 years ago and this is what it's going to look like in 500 years.
"I have cried with frustration at times, when you're just so wet and miserable and cold. You might have to walk two or three hours and it may piss down in gale force winds and your hands are numb.
"It's so cold you can't reach to undo the camera and you've got tears of frustration as well as the rain, or else everything's wet through and your perfect light's there. You know that's months of preparation to get there and you let yourself down."
Apse would hate to read that he's a survivor. The 60-year-old, whose work has recently graced the Air New Zealand The Lord of the Rings plane, smoothes over his early years. The biography in his bestselling New Zealand Landscapes simply says, "Andris Apse was born in Latvia in 1942 and spent five of his first six years with his mother in a Berlin WWII refugee camp."
They emigrated to New Zealand. When he turned 18, the New Zealand Forest Service woodsman went to Fiordland. "There was a million hectares of bush, forests, rivers and not a footprint apart from the wildlife. I fell in love with it. That's why I became a photographer. I thought, OHow can I show other people this?"'
His pilgrimage became the stuff of legends. Six weeks at a time, camped in the rain and the cold, fishing and shooting game to survive. Friendly fishermen would sometimes drop in a newspaper and bread and secretly fill his cray pots.
Apse is a planner. He leaves nothing to chance, working with a compass and a map, figuring out the angles of the sun and the best time to take the photograph. "There are a few photographs in these sets that have taken years to get. I've been aware of a possible image but have gone back time and time again and it just hasn't happened.
"Sometimes you just feel totally alone without another person in the world and other times I'm totally exhilarated . . . literally dancing with joy and just shouting because it's all happening and I can't believe it."
If other people were there, he says, he wouldn't show that emotion. "Even with Andy, I'd say in a manly sort of way, OShit, that's nice Andy'."
Andy Dennis. Conservationist, guide, author and translator of old Icelandic, he's written forewords to two earlier Apse books and contributed an essay to this latest venture. His admiration is unreserved.
"We haven't spent the time in Fiordland that Andris has; we can look at the photos on a light box and have dinners and share that experience. That's part of the enrichment he's given us, that makes us throw a few words at him and say if you can use these, you can have them."
In 1994, Dennis was working on the foreword to New Zealand Landscapes. Apse was visiting him in Nelson when he got word his mother had died. Dennis says that's when he really saw his friend's soul.
"He started to talk, as people do in that period of absolute turning point . . . he talked about himself and his past and we gradually worked around to talking about Fiordland - that's a time when people talk about their love affairs and what really matters to them."
Today, they share a rough affection. Two bottles of wine bring out the small boys poking sticks. It's nearly midnight and Apse is showing Hulme and Dennis their books. Keri gets the blue and green images, Andy the sunrises and sets. Andris claims what he calls the mood shots. They are a huddle at the end of the table, teasing and praising, oblivious to the presence of a reporter and a photographer.
Apse: "See the heads of the sound here? I climbed up that bloody ridge, round here, along here, took the sunset from that point there, then with a torch that failed because I dropped it against a rock, made my way back down there through the guts and down the other side to a tent which is on the tops there and got back at three in the morning, and I was lucky to find the bloody thing."
Dennis: "No helicopters. That's pioneer Fiordland . . . then I ran down this ridge, swam the fiord, because I needed dry firewood for the fire and that was the only dead tree I could see in the whole of the saddle . . ."
Hulme: "I want to see these in daylight. There are trolls in some of your photos."
Apse: "It's like find Wally."
Hulme: "Where will I build my tree house?"
Apse: "Have another glass of wine."
Hulme: "The warm glows, the tranquillity . . ."
Apse: "This one was coloured in with pastels, it came as just an outline to colour in with your paints or crayons. Age five, Andris Apse."
Hulme: "Give me that five-year-old; he's going to go places."
Dennis: "I never said you didn't climb that mountain, because I know you did . . . and he had to change his pants four times on the way back."
Apse: "This is the one that Andy Dennis raves on about, even though it's crap. I don't think we'll put it in."
Hulme: "Any minute now, it's going to bite you . . ."
But it never does. Because these are friends who tread gently on the earth, and who come together round a kauri table in the hope that others will love the world as much as they do.
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