Outlier TV Interview With Craig Potton New Zealand’s Best Landscape Photographer

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Andrew McCombe:

Hi, there. I’m Andrew McCombe and welcome to Outlier. In this week’s episode, we’re in beautiful Nelson, New Zealand, where I’m going to be speaking to Craig Potton, he’s New Zealand’s premier landscape photographer.

Craig has had the ability to turn his passion into his pension. It’s not very common for a lot of photographers, so let’s go and find out his secret. Craig, we’re on the Boulder Bank here in Nelson. It’s a beautiful location. It’s like we’re out in the wilderness. What’s your favourite thing about it?

Craig Potton:

Well, we actually are in the wilderness even though we’re pretty close to town. This is a place that I came as a kid when I was learning to surf and we discovered a surf spot out here. That’s how old I am. Surfing hadn’t really been going in New Zealand, even for very long. And this was a place that I found some good waves, just up from here. But even before that, I used to love collecting rocks. I was a little amateur geologist when I was a kid, just getting out here, and this is a phenomenal place because it’s all come from the bluff up there, these rocks. Longshore drift and it’s made this extraordinary Boulder Bank.

Andrew McCombe:

Totally natural. What amazes me about the place, is the the light, the different types of light.

Craig Potton:

Yeah. Well, Nelson, this place that we’re in now, is pretty renowned for having long periods of still, clear, weather wise. And so it has this low raking light, which we’ve gotten in winter today, casting big shadows but a very beautiful, quite sort of almost yellow light to it.

Andrew McCombe:

You are New Zealand’s premier landscape photographer. Obviously it’s been a journey and the one thing that really inspires me about it is that you’ve managed to turn it into a profession, which a lot of people struggle with. How did that all begin?

Craig Potton:

Yeah. I’m one of those unpatched, slightly unusual mixes of being an artist, but also an entrepreneur. My father, (and he was definitely a big influence on me in this respect), though at the time I didn’t actually notice it. In fact I was sort of closer to my mum than I was to my dad. But in reflection, looking back at it, it was that he had made it obvious to me about the fact that the world doesn’t owe you a living. You’ve got to get out there and make your own way in the world. So these in the days where, the early days where the headmaster at school, everyone was a bit tougher than they are now, perhaps, and there was this notion of resilience that we have now was a lot more apparent in those days. You just had to get out and do it. So that was the kind of entrepreneurial side.

If you’re going to go to university, you have to make the money to go university. You want to be a good photographer, you’ve got to make the money to buy the camera, to make the thing work. So you have to do jobs and you got to work after school and during the weekends and that sort of thing. So that’s the work side of it that was important. And I think that has put me in good stead. But the artistic side, I do look to my mother. I’m an artist. Artists often have quite strong relationships to their mothers because that’s where creativity and warmth and love and caring and having some empathy. Empathy is a really big thing. I don’t want to sound too new agey, but I do love the rocks out here. I love the ocean. I love the places that I’m in and wild places. So I got that empathy, I think from mum.

Andrew McCombe:

What was the light bulb that went on for you originally, when you were young around photography, was it the beauty? Was it the mission behind it? Was it the occupation behind it? Like what drew you to it in the first place?

Craig Potton:

Yeah, real interesting. I actually did start collecting rocks and connecting to nature before I started taking photographs. And I also apparently, according to my mother, so this is a story before I was aware of it, used to crawl before I could even walk, so I was less than two years old, outside and find little creatures. I even found a mouse once, she’s never forgotten, that had been almost drowned, but was still alive. Brought it back inside. “Look mum, look how beautiful this is.” “No darling, it goes outside,” she would say. So I had this desire to bring things to other people and show them how beautiful they were. So it does go right back to those very early days apparently. So that was a kind of a marker that I just had this fascination or this connection with things wild and the wilderness and things that we didn’t make, things that just stood out there before us but we couldn’t create. It wasn’t in the man made world. And so it’s funny, but I never went to movies a lot as a kid. I never even went to parties in adolescence so much.

I actually went to the mountains. I went surfing. So what attracts you? What drives you towards the wilderness? To this day I don’t know why I had that gene in me, but that gene was really in me. And that was before I realized that we are treating the wilderness so badly that we’ve actually got an environmental crisis on our hand. As soon as I found that out, something round about the age of 12, 13, 14 that I started reading and just looking and hearing as you can’t avoid, that they were cutting down a forest, that we were polluting the ocean, that we were treating animals badly. Then it really started to sink in.

The first photograph that I took. And I went back the other day and looked at it. It was a brownie box camera my dad gave me, and it was at Auckland Zoo and it was these poor creatures, in this case, it was a chimpanzee and there was another one of a lion in a cage. Absolutely the wrong way to treat animals. So the first film that I ever used was actually something that I’m still doing, which is trying to invoke a concern about the environment. It was quite unconscious. I thought it was amazing animal and it was at the zoo and I was happy, but it actually predicated my whole life’s work, really.

Andrew McCombe:

When you think about that image and that feeling that invoked in you, what was the original feeling? Cause obviously you then showed it through the photo. And the reason I asked that is for the Outliers out there, there are secrets within all of us that give us the clues, whether we choose to listen to them or not. And obviously you felt that looking at those animals, what was the feeling?

Craig Potton:

I really think it was looking into their eyes. They say that about wildlife photography, even about people or relationships and that if you can’t look into a person’s eyes and feel no threat, feel that there’s a connection there, then you’ve got to work out how to get that right with another person. So you look in to the eyes, of course, your mother, when you are very young and then your family and that expands out and being able to look people in the eye and in a genuinely open sort of way is essential to your relationship. And I think with animals, it was just looking into those, in this case, it was a lion and it was a chimpanzee and those eyes looked sad, really sad. But they looked as though they were beaten down in the same way that people can look beaten down. A lot of people. And that kind of brings up straight away this notion that there is suffering in the world, very real suffering that exists right through everything, through all life on the planet. And the way we treat it and also in itself.

I actually started getting quite anxious about that suffering when I was about 12, 13, 14, and that lead me, and it might sound funny to someone at that age, but I got into Buddhism, I got into Christianity because obviously there’s this God being nailed up on a cross, there’s this guy that sits under a tree called the Buddha from a very happy family until he’s lost all weight, until he’s found some answer to suffering. So without being too philosophical or too heavy about it, that was a big part of my early adolescence and my recognition and those photographs conveyed that suffering that those animals had around the way we treated them. There were bars in front of them and those bars just weren’t the physical bars. They were also the fact that we weren’t engaging openly with these animals. We were treating them as objects for our entertainment and we still do that.

Andrew McCombe:

And to make some money.

Craig Potton:

And to make some money. I’ve never been against people making money, but I’ve been strongly against anything that increases suffering on the planet and anything that I can do to relieve some suffering, to alleviate some suffering. And it’s at whole levels of your life, at a very practical level of helping people out around you that are… something’s going wrong, to actually working on quite big causes like forests being cut down or third-world problems, et cetera. So it runs through from the personal, to the political, to the wider world.

Andrew McCombe:

And you went to university and studied Eastern religions. Did you find that that was your way of understanding suffering or was it for a deeper purpose again?

Craig Potton:

Yeah, absolutely. I started reading Gandhi, the great Indian prime minister of the revolution that got rid of colonialism in India, when I was quite young, well before I went to university. I must have been 14, 15 and he talked a lot about the suffering of animals and he was vegetarian and he was aware of the fact that he didn’t need to kill animals to survive, that he could live on a diet that didn’t require that, and so he could eliminate an area there where I felt already uncomfortable about. When I was a very young kid, I went out hunting and shooting and fishing with my dad and it was a great outdoors experience. I love the outdoors, but I always had an anxiety when we pulled the fish in and knocked its head against the side of the boat to kill it and I’d squirm from an early age doing that. So there was something in me. How do I get to the bottom of how do we treat creatures better? How do we treat ourselves better? Literally the word suffering is dealt with in Buddhism. The first thing you learn in Buddhism is that everything is suffering. Everything has a component around it that is not good. And that by alleviating that as much as you can, you’ll never get rid of suffering, but by trying to remove that, which isn’t necessary to existence, and a lot of it isn’t necessary to existence, then you’re going to feel better. The world’s going to be better. Sounds very philosophical, but it’s actually quite pragmatic, quite practical, just get out and do it.

Andrew McCombe:

I also feel if you look at general Western society at the moment, there’s a lot of people chasing a false God called commercialism and everything that comes with that. So what you’re saying just on a practical sense is it’s a lot of that stuff never fulfills people, does it? So are you saying that to help remove suffering is actually to stop chasing those false gods?

Craig Potton:

Absolutely. Yeah, I think that the biggest problem today, you know selfies, where people take a camera and just take a photograph of themselves.

Andrew McCombe:

Mind blowing, isn’t it?

Craig Potton:

I mean the front of the head is a wonderful thing, but it’s not the end of the world or the start or the beginning or the end, or the middle for that matter. We’ve become too self obsessed and you can’t find happiness, I believe, I’m quite sure potentially, just introverting into yourself and with your Facebook, making yourself out to be the center of the cosmos. Yes, looking after yourself is important, but actually the greatest joy you get in life is when you do something for someone or something or somebody or some context that is beyond you, someone else. It’s actually engaging with the other. I studied a great Jewish philosopher at university Martin Buber and he talked about relationship as being the way in which we exist, actually connecting to the person, to the world out there, to the environment and he even went as far as to say, “Connecting to the rock, to the geology, to the place that you’re living in, that’s where happiness is.” And there’s this huge study done by Harvard University on what makes people happy, very hard thing to define and work out, but they’ve done it over 70 years now and they’ve come to conclusion. It isn’t diet. It isn’t how many wellness courses you do. It isn’t all of those things. It’s actually how well you connect to other people. That is what makes us most happy. You expand that out to how well you connect to the world, not just to other people, and you’ve got Buddhism the way I practice it. Which is to try to just expand that compassion, openness, connection out into everything. It doesn’t mean that I don’t get angry. It doesn’t mean that things are wrong, that I can’t correct, et cetera, et cetera, that there’ll always be those problems.

But I kind of feel that if I’m not just serving myself, but serving something beyond that, I’m a happier dude. I feel better. I’ve struggled, but I still feel better for doing it. If I get too anxious about myself. And I think it’s a big thing. People are getting very anxious these days about themselves. I don’t get any further forward. I’m just as anxious the next day about myself. I got the same neuroses. I got the same problem. I can’t get rid of it because it’s all just going around in a big circle in here. Walk outside, look out there now. Open yourself to what’s out there now. And a little bit of that anxiety just starts to dissipate. It just starts to let itself go into the world. I don’t want to sound as though it’s that easy, but that’s a practice that’s definitely helped me.

Andrew McCombe:

Well, you talk about connection with others, that’s going to help happiness. For the entrepreneurs and young Outliers out there who are maybe questioning what they’re doing in life. Maybe the teenagers and students at university, et cetera, how important is actually connecting with who you are? And then to take that to the next level. What’s interesting to me, you didn’t study photography, you studied Eastern religion, but you’re a photographer. So I guess what I’m trying to get at is was that a phase of life thing? Or is that part of the journey thing as a way of you expressing yourself even more? How does that relate to the young Outlier out there about themself and them being themselves and true to their self and then being able to fully express themselves?

Craig Potton:

Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a wonderful little tale in Hasidism which, again, is a Jewish mystical philosophy that I read a bit around and did quite a bit of that at university, that study, and it says that God doesn’t want you to be Moses. God wants you to be Craig Potton? In other words, we all have an individual way in which we approach the world because of the individuality of the way we’ve been brought up. The context or the place we’re in, the parents we’ve had, the friends we make, et cetera. So being yourself is more important than emulating someone else. As much as I’ve talked about being not too involved in your head, if you don’t get the head sorted out, then, you are no use to anyone else that’s for sure. You do have to get that sorted out pretty quick. Sorting that out is what should drive you out there rather than keep it all in here and get too anxious. You do have to have a strong will. You’ve got to not compromise too much, You have to compromise a bit, but you’ve got to say, “No, that’s where I’m going. That’s what I’m doing.” And certainly when we started with friends of mine to conservation, we were 17, 18 years old, we’re getting a lot of flack, a lot of criticism publicly, you need a bit of a will to stand up against that. So you do need to be yourself for sure. And being yourself does require a certain courage. I’m going to get up and I’m going to do that. To hell with the critics, to hell with what everyone’s saying around me. I guess I’d say to young people , this is very obvious, but don’t give up. Really stick at it and if it fails the first time, go again, go again, go again, go again. I go for about seven times. There’s a point where you come after not because it’s not going to happen but do not giving up on that first failure. My dad was an entrepreneur. He probably started in the order of 40 businesses, probably 15,16 of them went seriously bankrupt. And he was only able to cross subsidize and get out of them because of the success of some other ones.

Most things you try won’t work the way you expect them, or they won’t work at all. Back your winners, get onto them, do them. Acknowledge that you want to keep moving forward. So you’re going to try something that will quite possibly fail. And I think that’s quite hard these days. Some people feel, “I want to be a great photographer. I’ll go to do the Polytech course. I’ve done four years learning. I’ve learnt how to sell myself, et cetera. I’ll get out there and it’ll start happening.” Sometimes it doesn’t. And just in timing, you’ve got to accept the time’s right or the times wrong. The tide’s coming in, the tide’s going out on this particular idea, and I have a number of those proposals that I think are very good in my head, but the time’s wrong. They’re not going to work at present for whatever reason, personal, relational, economic, et cetera. So people need courage. They need to be patient around, things like that, and they need to acknowledge that some of the things they want to do, that they want in life are not going to come out the way they planned them.

There was a great quote from John Lennon, “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.” In other words, it’s good to have plans, make the plans, but expect them to be modified by reality, expect them to change. So just a few examples, when I was very young and started photography and wanted to move it towards making a living for me, because prior to that, I was working as a full-time conservationist and people were giving us money to survive at that time, I decided I wanted to morph into making some money through photography. I gave away my photographs sometimes for nothing, sometimes very cheaply just to get my name established. And I believed enough in them to know that they were good work. So I thought, “Well, these are good photographs, I’ll get them out there.” And people think, “well, they have got a certain value.” The only value that I’ve got is what they’ll realize in the marketplace.

And if the marketplace isn’t going to take them, because they don’t know who you are. Craig who? Then you’ve got to get them out there, get them acknowledged. So you don’t want to sell yourself cheaply in terms of your own heart and your soul, but entrepreneurs, people that are successful, you’ll often find that in the early days, they did a lot for very little value monetarily, but for value or capital in the quality of their product. So you’ve probably heard this from business people and even the model of Amazon, where they lost for years and years and years before they started making profits. And my photography, I didn’t make a lot for the first, maybe five years. It wasn’t till I was established, two people said, “Hey, Craig Potton is taking good photographs”, that I could start putting my price that I could start. And I think some people want to get to the end point quicker and the journey often is actually quite hard and you do have to not spend too much on other things. In other words, not have a big income through that period. How do you get there? Everyone has their own way of getting there. Everyone has their own time in which they go there. So that the time now for a young photographer is different than the time 1970s, eighties, when I was a young photographer.

Andrew McCombe:

Just on that, you’ve done five years or so with no real return financially, but what were you learning in that five years? To me, it sounds like you’re giving a lot of value, which also had value to you because you were getting value in other ways. What was that value for you in the early days?

Craig Potton:

Well, the early days it was as I said, morphing between wanting to earn most of my living to do more of my work through photography. It’s just not the only way in which I have made money during life. For sure, I’ve made surf boards, I’ve made women’s clothing, I’ve had stores, I’ve had a whole lot of things that have gone on before I really got my passion going in a financial way, and they were ways if you wish to fund the beast, to keep the thing going. And they are an absolutely essential part of my story. But why did I really want to get into photography and make that the way in which I lived, the way in which I actually made a living and was able to work full time at it? Those sorts of questions are very individual and to me, they came through in part, by reading and my looking at art and my talking to people whom I really admired that were doing things in the world that I thought were meaningful. That’s a very broad set of values to talk around.

Andrew McCombe:

But they were your mentors, they were your motivators.

Craig Potton:

They were. To start as a photographer. It’s almost as if photography was just the, if you wish, the gift that I could extend within myself. I tried to be a poet, but my poetry was lousy mate, absolutely lousy, but I wanted to be, and I still have a bit of a… You talk about artists often is that they’re frustrated musicians, if they’re photographers, they’re frustrated, and poets say, “I wish I could take a photograph or a play an instrument.” It’s all about communication in the arts in particular. Communicating through the emotive, feeling, reasons, rational side of your head. So it’s not just all emotion and feeling, but it’s definitely that they are the ones, the imagination that you’re exciting. Because people respond more around the imagination. We’ve learned this a lot in the last two decades, really just the extent to which the brain is ignited by the imagination rather than by the reason. We have to be reasonable. If we’re not, things go very wrong, but essentially we’re not reasonable primarily as creatures, we’re actually creatures that are driven by imagination by our feelings. We have to get some control over them. Otherwise we just become selfish idiots that look after ourselves and our own feelings drive us to strange places, but they’re actually what drive us. And so art is dealing with the imagination. It’s dealing with exciting people into something beyond themselves. I’ve looked at that around spiritual dimension. And it’s always fascinated me that there is something much greater than my own head at play in the world. To me, that’s obvious and it’s to do with, I go outside in the morning. It’s beautiful. That beauty is not because Craig Potton walked outside. That beauty is there, it’s a given. It’s a fact of existence.

It’s an extraordinary thing, and I feel happy within it. So how do I relate to it and Eastern philosophy and Middle Eastern philosophy. I also read a great deal and did a degree in English literature in the modern novelists like D. H. Lawrence, who said, “We’re right at of relationships with our body and our mind and the world.” That’s what that guy said a hundred years ago, is he right? He’s totally right. You know, so I was reading everything that D. H. Lawrence wrote. By the time I was 18, I think I’d read every word that was published that I could of his, because he was just touching on something that I felt not only instinctively, I looked out there and the way we were treating the world, the way we were treating our bodies and our mind connection, it was all askewed. It was all over the place. It wasn’t working in a contemporary society. And he said lots of wonderful things that inspired me, as did Eastern philosophy. So it was those underlying mental conundrums that I was dealing with that actually drove me and informed why I wanted to make images to put out there. It sounds like I’m talking about a great deal of background rather than the images themselves, but they’re actually the motive and the motives are really significant, Why are you doing it? And that is what drives good art. That’s what makes people good at things because that, in a good way, makes them obsessive about repeating things til they get it right. Why would you just repeat photographing or photograph this horizon out here and this piece of ocean for 50 years? And people would say, “Now pretty well, 20 years ago Craig, why do you keep going?”

And that’s that obsession of the artists. That’s the desire of the artist. There is always your next masterpiece. Bob Dylan song, “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and you know he’s never going to paint his masterpiece. That’s not going to come, but , he’s always going to strive for that masterpiece. And I guess it’s the striving, the wanting to do better, to say better, to communicate, to get out there and that if you take that out from your photography or from whatever you’re doing in life and extend that out into the way that you want to treat everyone and to treat the world, then you’re likely to be better off for doing that. I mean, I dont want it felt that I’m some sort of person who’s made this great effort in a way which is a struggle, it’s actually a joy to do it rather than the struggle.

Of course, it’s a fight at times. And of course it doesn’t always go, right. And of course there are problems, et cetera, but actually I get most happiness when I’m driving down the West Coast and I look at this forest and think, “Me and a few mates and a big public movement in New Zealand, saved that forest” It’s sitting there, it’s a legacy. It’s wonderful. It won’t be touched. So I make a good photograph. People come into my gallery in town and they see those photographs and they look at me in the eye and they just say, “Thank you. That feels good. I love coming in here, Craig, these images that just give me a degree of peace and a degree of happiness.” Walk out the door and I think good. One up for Craig, I’ve done something today.

So, just bringing that image into the world, it’s already there, but making it and placing it in a way that people can engage and connect with. That’s, kind of the real motivation, I think, behind the photography. And it’s why when people say to me, “Why didn’t you a course on photography at Polytech and learned from the great teachers there?” And I say, “Well, yes, its great to do those courses. You learn a lot of technical information, but essentially it’s as important.” And I don’t decry those courses. They are good for people and perhaps I should have done one because I’m not overly technical, but what really counts is that you want to do what you want to do and you work out how to do it and the how is the technical. It is just a matter of going until you master those technical things through trial and error through learning.

I’d also say that even though I haven’t had a formal education I’ve been very aware that people who’ve gone before me down exactly the road, I’m going down, thousands of people and from the first person drawing the first image in a cave art, be it in Indonesia, or be it in Spain or in France and those cave art, that’s 40,000 years ago, artists have been making marks to try and convey something of the value of the world to others. So I have learnt hugely. My teachers have been going into art galleries and looking at photographs by the American photographer, Eliot Porter, by Ansel Adams, looking at wonderful paintings of the landscape. That’s not just teachers. They’ve put their work up there. I absorb it. I’m grateful to them.

Andrew McCombe:

You talk about the connecting to your why? And so I guess that’s the imagination side and then the how is more the logistical side is the why teachable to people? If you look back on your journey, if you looked at the Outliers there, is there something you could say that help you connect with that more, or is it just getting out into nature ?

Craig Potton:

Yeah, I think it’s finding your own way through engagement, not just with you per se, walking out into nature or whatever, but also literally not being scared to engage. And, I mean that in a real broad sense that we hold ourselves back we are a bit anxious, often it starts at school or when we get into early social engagement with other people, we just hold back a bit. We’re a bit worried that, we’ll let too much out about ourselves. We’ve developed a thick skin because people criticize us and not as much as bullying at school, but people say something and it hurts us just trying to open up. And I think that opening up is something that is not just as I say, not just in the art world and not just in what I’m doing, but actually opening yourself out. And of course, primarily it is actually to people that you open yourself out right from the very beginning and not being scared of being hurt because other people at times can be cruel. And that’s a fact, You don’t want to walk around that. They can be quite hard. They can knock you back and that certainly happens at school. And just somehow to develop some way in your resilience, in yourself to say, “He or she was being a bit of a prick today, but that’s okay, the sun’s going to come up tomorrow, the day is going to be good.” So it’s not being fearful of letting your soft or your creative or your imaginative side. It’s not a cruel hard world. It’s a world that will knock you for sure.

So it’s not just all soft pillows and roses. It’s actually a tough world, but it’s not “an aggressively against you world.” A lot of people develop this notion and develop a hard skin and I’ve got to make my own way in the world and they tighten up. I think often tightening up is the biggest mistake. We know that pain is really just an experience of where your muscles tighten up, because someone’s put a drill into your mouth if you’ve gone to the dentist. I learned pretty early on that if I go to the dentist, someone’s drilling my mouth (in those days, we didn’t have injections too much, we were in a tougher world if you wish) if I just lay there with my mouth open and tried to completely relax, just let everything go there was a lot less pain. And that is a metaphor for the fact that if you don’t tighten up, literally you won’t suffer as much. If you try to guard everything, guard every penny, guard every relationship, guard everything. You’re always tight and on the defensive, and that will cause pain. It will cause pain. The more that you can open out without being silly about it and relax and just except you’re going to be knocked around, but hey, you’re going to be knocked, then you will come back again. Then less pain, if things feel a bit better.

Andrew McCombe:

We talk about that at Outlier is pain is just a feeling you don’t want to feel. So if you resist feeling it, it’s going to continue to feel like pain and then suffering is just continuing not to want to feel pain over a period of time. right? But if you just allow yourself to be in the present with the feeling very quickly, it disappears, doesn’t it? And then you are able to express yourself a lot more.

Craig Potton:

Yes. And that’s definitely the case with a great deal of the way which we face the world. There are other things which are worth noting, which is that some pain is real for very good reasons. And my wife died slowly of cancer when we had a 10 year old child and that took four years and we knew it was an inevitable end. My best friend died recently, very energetic guy and he was gone within three months. And if you try to think that you’re going to somehow walk around that pain, you’re an idiot. It’s absolutely real and I still feel close to my wife that died and it’s a wonderful feeling now, but it’s 10 years after the event. During those periods where things are going wrong, I mean the same with mountain climbing, you’re going up the mountain, it’s freezing cold. You’re on the rope. You’re waiting for the other guy to finish putting the protection and it’s just bloody painful. You have to go through pain to get to good places.

Andrew McCombe:

Well, how would know you exist if you only felt the positive feelings? If there’s no dark with the light, how would it’s light?

Craig Potton:

So definitely that. That’s about it. Yeah, it’s an integral part of the way in which we go through the world. So maybe I’ve painted a picture that has been a little bit too rosy. You do have to go through tough, hard situations and I think a big part of that is just being prepared to take risks, knowing that risks could in the short term result in more pain, not less pain. The analogy there is mountain climbing. I did a lot of mountain climbing, surfing in the middle of winter, putting on the wetsuit, in the freezing cold when the snow is down on the mountains, et cetera, No one but a very deluded person would say that was all joyful. It’s actually not. Getting to the summit, catching the wave. Yeah. Pure joy. How did I get there? By freezing. So yeah, sometimes it can be a long, strange trip getting to these good places. In those long, strange trips that you’re going through can involve and does involve inevitably, actually often, even in photography and books, you publish and don’t sell or, you’d do a whole week somewhere and the camera didn’t work properly or whatever. You got to deal with it and it is just going to happen.

Andrew McCombe:

So you talk about the long, strange journey. You were studying Eastern religion at university. What happened after that?

Craig Potton:

Well, during that, not even after it, I was very much involved in recognizing that the forest to the West Coast, to the South Island, the country that I lived in, surfed in, and climb mountains in, were being cut down and that were being logged to be sent at a very low value to Japan, to chip mills, which would pollute, the water up there and deliver us toilet paper at a very, cheap price that we all felt fine about, but we were losing this extraordinary heritage. So I got involved in protesting about that, and that became an absolutely major part of my life for several decades. I have to put it in context too. This was a period where I was also protesting about the fact that New Zealand rugby teams were playing in South Africa against white only teams. Apartheid was… So we were protesting to halt all racial tours. East Timor was trying to split away from Indonesia. People were dying in that freedom fight. We had one of those guys in our flat that had escaped. So there was a great deal of social ferment and protest around issues that we felt at the time, that the government were making bad decisions on that we wanted to change those decisions.

Andrew McCombe:

So what I’m hearing is you’ve got a deep rooted causality or cause ethos that goes within you. And also you’ve obviously fought for a lot of causes. Was there a period where you just decided it’s time to communicate this and you started to do that through the camera? Is that how it all began?

Craig Potton:

No, I’ve been taking photographs well before then, so no. There’s no sort of a golden moment in my life. It’s always been a cumulative thing. Things that have been important to me have developed until they’ve reached a point where they’ve exploded into a major and certainly photography and art had been there from when dad gave me the brownie box camera when I was 12 years old. So that was taking the image and that had grown, but in some ways I’ve been sidelined by reality. Reality was what was happening with these protest movements. In other words, they were cutting down the forest. Yes, you could drive down and you could have your eyes and the blinkers on like horses have and look straight ahead, but it was actually happening outside the window there. They were cutting down the forest. When I was on my way to my surf spot in the West Coast, or I was on the way to go climbing a mountain, they were cutting it down there. That river was being polluted. Yes, I could ignore that and just live my own personal life and be happy and be a successful photographer, climber, surfer, but actually I couldn’t ignore it. When I looked out there, it was wrong. I had to get stuck into that. I’ve often talked about it. It’s like a melancholy fact that you’re brought up in a world that you want to do things and that the world also is going to throw things at you, that you have to face that you don’t necessarily, that it wasn’t on your agenda. It wasn’t in your list of things to do today.

“Save the forest, Craig.” It was something that was thrown at you and it might be the same thing that your wife gets cancer. You’ve got to look after her. You have to stop the amount of work you were doing. You’re really excited about all your work you’re doing, but the priority is to look after your wife, not to do the work for that period. Time will pass. Things will change, but you’ve got to be able to acknowledge that your dream has to be put to the side while you work through something else. Saving the forest, dealing with the wife’s illness, et cetera, et cetera, because we had a child by that point in time. So whole years of my life have not had that compulsion of being able to be realized through photography as much as I’d like, but I have utterly no regrets about that. All that is, is just life’s throwing up these things at you that you didn’t anticipate, you didn’t want, but by hell they happened and you had to address them. So, yeah. I think going into why did I just keep doing the photography? Why didn’t I stay as a conservationist? What was it that really, which I think you’re asking, really drove that one through? There’s a number of things in there. One is just that I genuinely believe that creative imagination, if excited in the right way, is the way in which humans will not only gain more joy for themselves, but will also treat the world and everything around it better. I really believe that. So the creative imagination is ignited through art. It’s ignited through philosophy. It’s ignited through the way in which we understand the world and so it did dawn on me in a growing sort of way that photography was not just a way to make a living, but also something that, was my kind of gift, my kind of mission, my kind of way that I could speak and do things out there rather than other people do other ways. That this was my way, this was Craig’s way of getting there.

Andrew McCombe:

You talk about your imagination and the journey of imagination you’ve must have been on some incredible journeys and obviously taken some great photos at those destinations on those journeys as well.

Craig Potton:

Yeah. Well, I’ve been incredibly lucky and people say you make your own luck. I have been to all the offshore islands of New Zealand and been to Antarctica and been to The Dry Valleys and done a book on The Dry Valleys of Antarctica, which was the first book done on that area. So I’ve been to some pretty extraordinary places around the world and partly those I’ve set up before hand, they weren’t just serendipitous, they weren’t just luck.

Andrew McCombe:

Was that a desire to go to those destinations?

Craig Potton:

Yeah. I’ll do a book on that because I want to go there. Not because I want to do a book on it per se or…

Andrew McCombe:

It’s a great point though, isn’t it? So you’re choosing what you’d love to do, and you’re saying essentially how can I get to go there and how can I make it work financially?

Craig Potton:

Hell of a good point. Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s the case. I mean, sometimes people get ass about face or around the wrong way. They actually think, well, this is the mode in which I will make a living in life rather than this is what I want to do, I’ll now work out how to make a living, and I’ve probably favored the left side there. The latter side of that, which is, this is what I want to do, now I’ll work out how to make a living through that and it’s not naive. It’s actually what you love and believe in, you’ll put most energy into and you’ll probably be best at from your point of view. And your point of view is the only point of view that is going to get the game done for you and it’s going to get the job done so to speak. There’s a bit of that, definitely. I mean at the time I fought with my dad during adolescence around philosophies of life because I was an, alternative living, these days, we look back and describe as a hippie , and Eastern philosophy, all those things that he wasn’t into, but what I now recognize that he gave me and that I picked up, so it took him to give, and it took me to pick up, it’s a double way that occurs was just the ability or the desire, the chutzpah to take risks, to say, “Well, that’s what I really want to do. I’m going to lay everything out there that I can and make the biggest effort to do that.” And dad was great like that when I was a kid. I would show a slight interest in sailing, so he would find me a bloody boat, push me out into the ocean with the sail up and say, “Go for it son.”

Andrew McCombe:

Work it out.

Craig Potton:

I’d be freaking, I’d be thinking, hell there is a current here. The wind’s coming and I’m just about gone over, what do I do dad? “Keep going boy, you’re doing fine, boy.” He was always watching, he’d always pick you up if you fell over. But he definitely was very good and he lived the life and it’s not just what you tell your kids, it’s how you live. That the pattern that he lived was that he took risks and some of those risks worked. Some of them did not work and he had to live with both. You got to live with things and he did of being very successful in the end, but he also had to live with the fact that every so often in the newspaper, it said, Dick Potton’s business gone bankrupt, owes creditors, we’ll pay them back in three years or whatever. Try to be as moral as you can, but hell things go wrong as much as they go, right,

You’ve just got to, and it was his philosophy, you just got to have 52%, right and 48% wrong and you’re a winner because it’s that risk taking that we get fearful of and probably as we get older and other people get dependent on us. I didn’t get into a full-time relationship and have a child until I was in my thirties. So prior to that, I did some pretty hairy climbs on mountains and we walked from Milford Sound to Nelson Lakes and things that would be much harder to put in place if you are in a close relationship with someone else, and had a child for good reasons because they’re dependent on you. It wasn’t as though I didn’t want to necessarily get into those relationships, but it was a conscious effort to think that while the body’s at full flight, I want to do these things.

Andrew McCombe:

Of those incredible destinations, which are some of your favorites?

Craig Potton:

Yeah. It’s good you put that in plural. If you said one spot, that’s a devil’s question but I definitely love the West Coast forests. And you got to say that that is in part because of my relationship for trying to save those places, but you also got to say that there’s something about those forests that are quite different than forests at temperate zones all around the world and I’m not the first person to notice that. There was an amazing botanists that came here, Cockyane in the 1890s and he realized that New Zealand’s, South Island in particular, the forest that was left down there because most of New Zealand was covered in forest before Māori and Pākehā started clearing it and burning it, is subtropical. So it’s like you’re in a tropical forest, but you’re in quite a cold environment and that’s unusual. I mean, it’s spooky actually and so it’s got the big lianes and creepers and it’s got all that feeling as if you’re in the Amazon or an Indonesian forest. And I felt that right from the start, these are extraordinary places. This is not parkland, this is actually a jungle and I loved it, but it was very hard to photograph it and no one had photographed it very well. In fact, terribly because it’s very messy, it’s got all the lianes, it’s got all these things happening all over the place within it. It’s not just tall Redwood trees that sit up perfectly, or your gum trees in Australia or whatever it’s actually complex and every tree had different epiphytes growing all over it. So that kind of became problematic if you wish, and I kind of love hard problems.

So this was the, “How am I going to capture this in a way that I love, but also that speaks to other people?” So here’s a hidden beauty. People that of course photograph lakes of the South Island and that photograph mountains and the sky and the sunsets and they’re beautiful and wonderful and I still photograph them, but this internal forest stuff, hadn’t been done well. So it was kind of a ground zero for me to work at. They are the places I love, so one of the photographs that I’ve just cherished from the beginning of my getting serious about photography is South Westland rainforest and it’s been responded to very well by a lot of people so they love that photograph too. It became one of my icons. I have to say that you can’t do everything in any art form that you’re involved in and as much as I loved being up in the mountains and seeing the alpine flowers, and taking the macro lens out, or the alpine butterfly that existed in this incredible and difficult environment, or I love the coast and the oceans and everything else, I realized that if you cover everything, it’s too much. So my intensity and focus in photography was to hone in on a particular forest area, what I’d call middle ground and it was quite specific. Now I still do photograph all kinds of landscapes that I love to go to and all kinds of photography that I focus, I concentrate, I put energy into this middle ground, internal New Zealand forest photography. And you do have to I guess the word is specialize; you do have to focus quite intensely on something if you’re going to get good at it.

Someone like Picasso drew the same, woman’s head a hundred times, 200 times, 300 times, and then he just produced one that looked as though it was the first, it was so beautiful and so faultless and so without strain. But all of that beautiful faultless without strain came from a huge amount of faults, strain, a huge amounts of problems. He’d solved those problems. He got to a point where it looked as though it was spontaneous and beautiful. And I’m hoping that that’s where my photography is with the forest.

Andrew McCombe:

Some of the other locations like forest is a big one.

Craig Potton:

Yeah. Forest is a huge one and different forests have started to excite me, but definitely around lakes, around the ocean, that horizon line. So where are the locations? I’m a New Zealander, I’m a South Islander, I live at the top of the South Island. I have a holiday home near a place called Farewell Spit and the locations, it’s not coincidental that I have a holiday home there. The big wild West Coast ocean has become obsessional for the last 30 years of the inside Farewell Spit is a very calm area because it’s sheltered from this big 20 kilometer long sand spit. But I’m obsessed with taking images there. I don’t take 10, I don’t take 20. I don’t take a hundred. I take thousands over the years, of these places in an attempt to get everything out of them and to make the image that I can. They are the sort of close to home places that I focus on most. Now, having said that I’ve always loved, from watching Jane Goodall on TV, chimpanzee, the apes, our connection. So I’ve been in Sabah and it was a wonderful trip.

I’ve loved the fact that there’s this big rock that sits in the middle of Australia and does nothing but glow. So I’ve been to Ayers Rock, to Uluru. I’ve been there and I’ve taken my camera and I’ve gone back each day, each morning and evening again and again. I’ve been to the Dry Valleys in Antarctica because I saw Eliot Porter’s photographs of the Dry Valleys in Antarctica. I’ve traveled through America briefly several times because my wife came from there, from California. I had to go to the Redwoods. I had to go to Grand Canyon. I did know that work of Ansel Adams. I had to go to Yosemite. I did know the work of Eliot Porter, et cetera. So those places have been partly driven by my excitement and desire to go there and partly driven by what artists had already done in those areas and I wanted to go and pay a homage, to just acknowledge, to see, to be in those sorts of places. I actually don’t feel there’s a problem if I’m standing before Niagara Falls, which I have, and there’s lots of people around me, we can all find an incredible sustenance in the energy of that place. But equally, having said that if I’m in the Dry Valleys and there’s only me and my mate in this whole valley, it creates a very different feel about how small you are in a big universe. How humans, although they are the dominant species on the planet, can’t control everything and I’m not an either or person, I’m a social person. I like people too. I love nature, obviously then I wouldn’t do the photography and do all the area around trying to encourage them to be there, but equally I like solitude. I like spaces where I’m on my own and I’m out there on my own, and that can be achieved. If I just walk two or 300 yards this way on this boulder bank, I’m in nature, no one else is around, the odd guy walking his dog, the odd Australian television crew up the road, but otherwise I’m on my own and I’m there. So it’s yin yang and they’re both important solitude and social. They’re not either, or, but you can’t have both in the same place.

Andrew McCombe:

Which comes first? The environment when you’re taking a photo or the photo? You know what I mean? Being in these incredible grandeur landscapes. Is that more important to you or is it capturing the fact that you were there and hey, now everyone can see it.

Craig Potton:

Yeah. It’s driven by both actually and even yesterday someone said to me, ” Why haven’t you gone to Africa? You’d love Africa.” We’ll yes, I would love Africa. I haven’t been to South America except just the top of it. So you can’t go to all the places that you’d love to go to in life.

Andrew McCombe:

Is that a $2 statement? Is that the belief?

Craig Potton:

It’s just the reality that you’ve got 70 or 80 years and if you made a list of all the good places that you’d seen you won’t get to them all and that’s fine. That’s absolutely fine. I mean, that you’d be a megalomaniac if you thought you could do everything and achieve everything, the universe doesn’t only exist in your head, it’s far bigger and that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. There are more places that you get to. That’s a good thing, not a bad thing. You’re not the only person. So if you establish that in your head and that headspace, but sometimes it’s serendipitous. I spend a lot of time in the Himalayas. I mean a huge amount of time. It’s actually my second home; the Himalaya’s. I love Tibetan Buddhism. That drove me in that area if you wish. But also I have friends and those friends climb mountains and like to wander and high up on passes, et cetera and they organize a trip and I say, “Hey, yeah, I’ll come with you mate. That’d be great.”

Andrew McCombe:

What would be the most Outlier destination you’ve been in for your photography? I know you’ve been to Poland. You’ve been to Iceland. You’ve been to India. You’ve been to Nepal. You’ve been to Tibet.

Craig Potton:

The most Outlier without a doubt is The Dry Valleys of Antarctica. They are a place where, when we got down and I went with my mate, Robbie Burton, who’s my publishing partner and good mountain climbing friend. We were told by the people down there that Scott Base, which is the New Zealand base, if we got out into the Dry Valleys and it blew as it does sometimes over 120 kilometers an hour, the tent which we took, would blow over and being mountaineers, that’s not something that’s pleasant, but what you do is you go and dig a hole in the snow cave or get under a rock. Now The Dry Valleys have no ice in them and no snow. That’s why their the Dry Valleys, there aren’t any big rocks. That is out there. That’s essentially saying that you’re putting your life at risk in a way that is quite scary. You’re a hundred plus kilometers from Scott Base. So if the weather turns bad, the helicopter can’t fly. Can’t get in. There’s no question that that was the most out there place that I’ve ever been, and we went for three weeks. We obviously helicoptered into that spot but they dropped us there with these tents and they dropped us with the food. We spent three weeks and I managed to put together an exhibition and a book around that. And that was right out there. But equally when you’re in The Dry Valleys, there’s very little life that you can relate to. There’s lichens and it’s very simple forms of animal and plant life and these frozen lakes under the ice. But otherwise you’re pretty much there with the geology. If you want to put it in that language. The other Outlier place on the planet are the offshore islands of New Zealand and they’re out there in a sense of time, not in terms of place. They actually represent a time before humans arrived in the world. So when you go to these islands and if you hear people that have been to them, if they give you talks about them, they’ll immediately tell you straight away that these huge, big albatross, these extraordinary forms of life are not scared of you. These are animals that have no fear. That you can walk right up to and put your nose right up to an albatross and have a conversation with it and it doesn’t back off in fear. And that is a hundred thousand years in the past because as we developed weapons to kill every animal on the planet that we wanted to kill, they developed fear of us for good reason. On the offshore islands, they don’t have that fear. It’s a time capsule of Eden, what life was like before we got violent.

Andrew McCombe:

And it’s an extraordinary thing because it’s not one of them, there’s 40,000 in that colony, there’s a hundred thousand in that colony. Penguins, albatross, seals. It’s teaming with life. You realize how much we’ve lost through our own destructive abilities. And you realize why you’re a conservationist and you want to bring it back to New Zealand and I’m involved in a project where we were fencing off a headland to bring all the seabirds back onto the mainland of New Zealand to keep the predators out the fence. So that they are safer inside there. That abundance of life and the same thing with the ocean. If we’d gone into the ocean 40,000 years ago, just the amount of life in the ocean would just stun us, it would absolutely stun us. Not just the big guys, like the whales and the dolphins and everything. There would be fish that would be so thick it would be like swimming through a blanket. We’ve got rid of all that. That doesn’t mean that we can’t bring it back. Okay. We’ll never be exactly the same, extinctions have occurred, but I’m the ultimate optimist about everything that I can be optimistic about and hopeful about everything I can be hopeful about. And where we have created Marine reserves and where we have fenced off areas of the mainland and brought the seabirds back. We can start to recognize we can start to bring back. And it’s the thing that’s being talked about now, rewilding the world, this notion that we can rewild the world. I’ve got a friend that lives on the border between Scotland and England, and he’s got this long-term plan. He’s bringing the forest back, but he’s going to bring back the otter, then he’s going to bring back the Fox and then he’s going to bring back the bear, and then he’s going to bring back the bison, the European bison. And I said, “When are you going to do this, Alan?” He said, “The bear is coming back in 200 years and the oxen in 300 or something and we’re going to get the bison back within 500 years, Craig.” That’s fantastic. It’s brilliant.

Isn’t that great? It’s not a short term focus, but it is a long-term by-product of putting things in place now.

Craig Potton:

Yeah, absolutely.

Andrew McCombe:

Will the Lochness Monster come back?

Craig Potton:

No, well, it doesn’t exist probably won’t. But the thing about the Lochness Monster is it’s evocative of Eden. It’s evocative of what the world was like before it went wrong and so I Iaugh and smile about it. There was something in that lake clearly. As there was and all through our mythologies and stories, we tell our children, et cetera, about these extraordinary animals that we talk to, or they talk to us in strange ways in our past, and we’ve lost the language and we’ve lost the stories and we’ve lost the echoes of those stories be they the Lochness Monster or be they the wolf that befriends St Francis even. All those sorts of things, we can actually bring that relationship to nature back again. Not all is lost. We’ve lost something, things have gone wrong. We walked out of the garden of Eden, but we can walk back into it. It won’t be exactly as it was when we walked out because of the damage we’ve done, but it’s definitely worth walking back.

Andrew McCombe:

We’ve just got to act on it now, don’t we?

Craig Potton:

Absolutely.

Andrew McCombe:

When I look at some of your photos, especially the forest ones, I see a little bit of Maori mythology in there. I can just feel the energy of it. I know it’s just how you’ve captured it, but what I love about your journey, Craig is your passion and your purpose, and then your mastery of your skill have just been profound, but it’s also only half of the journey. Isn’t it? There’s also a part where you had to get your work out there. How did that go for you in the early days?

Craig Potton:

Yeah. “How do you sell the work that you love?” And there’s always a fear from some people around the fact that, well, I really love that. I can’t treat it commercially, and I think that’s just bokum. I don’t believe it. Not for a moment. I believe in trading, I believe that money is good. I believe that that’s how we actually have the food on the table in the morning, these days, et cetera. That’s how we have the books we have and the society we have. So I was never at all anxious about the fact that I wanted to make money out of my work. I wanted to do it in a way that was true to the work. I didn’t want to sell the soul if you want to put it in that sort of language.

Andrew McCombe:

And you can do both, can’t you!.

Craig Potton:

You can absolutely do both. In fact, it’s not so much that you can, you actually should do both. You should trade in the world because that is how you will put food on the table for yourself and for others.

Andrew McCombe:

That’s staying true to your message and who you are in the process.

Craig Potton:

Yes, and I’m going to be on a fine line here. I’m walking a bit of a tight rope, but at times that does require compromise. So you’re naive if you think: this is what I’m doing, the world’s got to take it as it is otherwise I won’t give it to them. Go and get another life mate, because in fact you have got to sometimes, and you’ll notice this in personal relationships with people. You’re an untidy person, your partner is tidy. You got to meet them halfway. You put a few of your socks in the drawer. You’ve got to do a few things like this. I had to start selling some photographs that I didn’t value as much from an artistic perspective, but they were commercial and to this day I still do that. I was aware that to be able to get my game going, to be able to present the work that I really loved, I would have to make some compromises in the world. I would be in the very early days, working for other publishers, not for myself before I started my own company allowing the fact that some of those photographs would not be printed on the best paper. They wouldn’t be proof checked properly. They wouldn’t come out as well as my standards demanded, but they were a necessary step on the way towards setting up my own company where I could get them to a quality that I wanted. To the ideals that I’d set myself. I could make my own mistakes rather than other people make mistakes for me. So you do, and I want to be a bit cautious around this, but you do have to compromise. You do have to have a bit of a business plan that isn’t all exactly the way you would like to present your work, but sure as hell would get your work out there, get you a name, get you established in the marketplace. All those sorts of things, absolutely essential. Again, I go back to my dad. He was an entrepreneur. You’ve got to have the product, but then you’ve got to sell the product. There’s no point in putting it in a dark cupboard and expecting people to come and find it and open their cupboard.

Andrew McCombe:

The passion doesn’t sell the product, in the cupboard!

Craig Potton:

Not at all it doesn’t. So you have to get out there and advertise yourself. Funnily enough, tied in with the conservation movement. People were cutting down the forest. We said it was wrong, but unless other people saw that, it wasn’t a message that got out there. So we had to do things in the city; street theater, we had to have public meetings. It’s exactly the same with photography. If you want to get your work out there, you’ve got to work out ways to put it before the public so that they’ve got a chance. And they may not all work, but at least they’ve got a chance. But if you think, I’ll put the work up in some obscure art gallery that no one goes to and think somehow you feel bad about the fact that people don’t recognize you’re a genius. You’re actually not on the right road for people to realize that the work’s good. They’ve got to see it, and they’ve got to see it in a place, in a way on which they respond to it. Not that you think that they should per se for a start. I gave away photographs to aeroplane magazines, to a woman’s magazine, to all kinds of things, just so that my caption, my name could be on them and people would see that’s a pretty cool photograph. That was taken by…

Andrew McCombe:

But you’re going out to a larger audience too, aren’t you?

Craig Potton:

…taken out by that guy. And a lot of my mates are, “What the hell are you doing in a woman’s magazine?” I’m actually just getting my name there and I’m getting the image out there and I’m not going to judge whether it’s a good or a bad magazine necessarily. I’ve got some ethics and morals, but I’m going to be fairly relaxed about these just to get it out there. A lot of it is selling, and I’ve got no problem with selling. I think it’s an essential element and not something that we should see on the edge of everything. It’s actually the way in which we do things.

Andrew McCombe:

Well, it’s almost part and parcel. Isn’t it? It’s a must. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you’ve got to have a passion. You’ve got to have a purpose. You got to have a cause, but at the same time, you’ve got to have a profit, don’t you?

Craig Potton:

Yeah, absolutely. Yes, you do. And and you’ve got to keep your costs less than your expenses. And that’s really important though, because a lot of people think, “Oh, I’ll just go out there and I’ve got so many good ideas. I’m going to present them in this way and I’m not going to compromise and that’ll cost $20,000.” Well, if I can’t recoup that $20,000, I’m in trouble,.

Andrew McCombe:

That’s called a loss, Isn’t it?

Craig Potton:

Its called a loss.

Andrew McCombe:

Or a learning?

Craig Potton:

Well, you can say it’s a learning. You can say whatever you like, but where’s the $20,000 going to come from? How are you going to replace the $20,000? If you’ve taken it out of your mortgage or your bank account or your education fund or whatever you’ve taken out of. Reality sandwiches, you’ve got to actually, every so often, just bite the bullet of the fact that you’ve got to make a living and, and that does require some degree of compromise.

Andrew McCombe:

And to help you make more of a living, you’ve also got a gallery. You’ve done some great work with some of the big production companies and movies you’ve done some documentaries. Tell us about those.

Craig Potton:

Yeah, well actually, I’ve been lucky, very lucky, but I worked for a start with my photography out there in public meetings. I didn’t get any money for them at all. I then worked for government departments on national parks doing books and I was mainly writing for them, not actually photographing and I sneaked more and more of my photographs into them. I was also making money by, we had a retail shop that we sold product, my brother and I, we bought in from the east, and I made clothing. I was juggling streams of income as I got better known for the photographs and started my own publishing company, New Zealand’s a market that’s not big. So people were seeing it from one end of the country to the other. And that jumped me into sort of a public recognition that people like Peter Jackson who made Lord of the Rings, the director, wanted to have these wonderful landscapes of New Zealand behind his images of Middle Earth. I mean, they weren’t meant to be New Zealand. They were meant to be Middle Earth. So they were to be mucked up a little bit on the computer, but hey, let’s get a landscape photographer to do those. That guy Craig Potton I see his name everywhere and that’s how it got known, so that’s how he picked up on me. So that was a great break. It was a good break that my life would’ve gone fairly similarly if I hadn’t had it, but it allowed me to sit in helicopters and do an immense amount of photography of landscapes that I could sell my own images and that they could be twisted around on a computer and made into Middle Earth.

And it was great fun too. I mean, there’s something very determined about a person like me wanting to photograph on my own and do my own thing. But every so often just the camaraderie of being with a big gang that’s making a movie, there’s hundreds of us and there’s 20 in my unit. And we’d all go down to the cafe in Queenstown and have a lunch that lasts for three hours cause we’re sounding arty and important and all that sort of stuff and then we get out there and do it together. That sort of team game in short bursts, I really enjoyed and still enjoy doing projects like that.

Andrew McCombe:

Lord of the Rings led to other projects for you?

Craig Potton:

Yeah, it did. It led to quite a bit of both location finding, but also photography for other movies, Edmondson’s movie, Narnia. So I worked on that and even as recently as the film that’s just been made in the South Island…

Andrew McCombe:

Mulan.

Craig Potton:

Yeah, there you go. I’m getting old, my memory banks. I was helping the location for that. King Kong used images and it was interesting there because we realized we didn’t have to go out and continually shoot. We could go into my photo bank. So some of the images I took in Indonesia were islands which were used in the back of King Kong when he’s sitting up on his nest with the girl and in the background, those are some of Craig Potton’s photographs. So yeah.

Andrew McCombe:

Do they then design a set around that photo or is it the other way around?

Craig Potton:

It’s a bit of everything, and it’s a good old fashioned American style is that they do storybook paintings of images of the mood that they want to create and I think it’s quite neat really. You start a good film by trying to get a feeling. An imaginative feeling. So we’re coming back to that notion of feeling rather than thought and you get that painted out. It’s just straight out old fashioned paintings and then you try and match that feeling and imagery in photography. So they pull me in, because I guess I have a background in not just photography, but also in art and painting. So I can kind of see ways in which you’ll pull that feeling from one media into the next media. They’re closely related, but they’re not the same. They then take those images and I would often do them in tiles, in the helicopter so that they could be joined together on the computer, and that way they’re still coming towards you rather than using a wide angle, which will push everything away. You want everything coming towards you and if they want to, they can flip Mount Cook around the other way so that it’s back to front.

Andrew McCombe:

Craig, an incredible, deeply rich journey of, you know we’re talking about photography but we’re really talking nothing about photography. So when you look to the young Outliers, the entrepreneurs that are out there and they’re at the start of their journey and you’re looking at the end of, well, not the end of your journey, you’ve got a heap to go. How would you sum it up for them as far as maybe helping them out a little bit on making that journey a little easier?

Craig Potton:

Well, yeah, I’d say straight away that if you’re looking for easy journey, don’t do what I’m doing. And I don’t mean that in any sort of self-sacrificial way, but I do mean it’s hard work. So just accept that it’s hard work. But I think a lot of Outliers, they know that in the first place anyway. They’re prepared to work hard. It’s just a matter of finding the direction and making sure that they’re true to their own direction. The passion, the desire to really want to do something and say something and communicate something out there, find out what it is within you. Write down little bits in your diary, go to the right movies and read the right books, talk to the right people, seek out mentors. They’re all just sort of ways in which you inspire yourself to just focus in on what it is that you want to do and be prepared to be influenced and modified by all of those sources that I’ve talked about because you’re starting a journey. You actually don’t know everything and never will, but you know even less than you will at the end of the journey. So don’t pretend that there’s some blueprint out there that’s got your name written all over it that you’ve just got to live through and it’s all done and as long as I follow it through with a lot of energy. It isn’t like that! The world will interact with you as you go along and you’ll interact with it, if you’re good in terms of getting, your message and your way out there. So accept that, that’s going to happen and then just work bloody hard at getting the, how you do it, working with the why you’re doing it. So even though I’ve not done a technical course in life through any professional Institute or anything like that, every time, every day that something’s gone wrong, I’ve made damn sure I didn’t do that next time.

Andrew McCombe:

Well, Craig, it’s been a privilege. I feel like I’ve been sitting with the Gandalf of New Zealand photography. Thanks for sharing your passion, your purpose and your wisdom. You’re officially an Outlier.

Craig Potton:

Thank you.

Andrew McCombe:

Well done.

Craig Potton:

Pleasure to be one!


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