'STOPOVER' By BRUCE CONNEWVICTORIA UNIVERSITY PRESS (RRP $40), Reviewed By JEREMY ROSE
Labour of love is a horribly hackneyed phrase, but it's difficult to think of another that adequately sums up the
exquisitely crafted work that is STOPOVER.
Bruce Connew travelled to Fiji seven times over a period of as many years to record the lives of Indo-Fijian community
of Vatiyaka.
The resulting work reveals a Fijian reality far from the well-worn tourist track. In a series of intimate photos Connew
lays bare the daily lives of a cane cutting community.
And it's a community in a sense that is all but foreign to a modern-day city dweller: a community that lives, works,
plays, bathes and prays together.
The late Michael King's argument that Pakeha have become Aotearoa's second indigenous culture seems both hopeful and
premature to me. King cited the overwhelmingly Pakeha tramping clubs as evidence of a connectedness to the land; yet the
desire to conquer every hill and mountain - as summed up in Ed Hillary's famous phrase: "We knocked the bastard off" -
can equally be seen as an expression of the colonialists' desire to dominate the land.
Connew's photos of the descendents of the indentured labourers that make up Fiji's dwindling Indian community, on the
other hand, provide a portrait of a community rooted to the land it toils.
In a short story by the Indo-Fijian academic, Brij Lal, which appears, a little eccentrically, in the centre of the
book, an old man asks: " Beta, desh ke ka hoi?" What will happen to this land? and the narrator comments: that it's an
interesting formulation because he is putting the nation - desh - before the indo Fijian community. "I wished Fijians
who were applauding the departure of Indians could see the transparent love an illiterate man like Kaka had for the
country."
Anyone lucky enough to get their hands on a copy of this book will see that "transparent love" in Connew's photos.
Despite the acres of column centimetres that have been devoted to Fiji and its recurrent coups I have no memory of
seeing images or reading stories about the lives of the cane cutting communities that make up the bulk of the
Indo-Fijian community.
The stereotypical Fiji Indian is, I suspect, for most people a shopkeeper.
Anti-Semitism has memorably been described as "the socialism of the fools" and there's no shortage of fools expressing
similar attitudes to Indians both here and in Fiji. The 'logic' is as simple-minded as it is dangerous: A lot of
businesses seem to be owned by Indians and some of those are rip-offs ergo all Indians are crooked business people.
Stopover provides a welcome window into an Indo-Fijian world that defies such stereotypes and documents a way of life
that is fast disappearing.
A series photos of cane cutters at work are reminiscent of Bruegel's painting of European peasants and equally stunning
and sensual is a series of pictures of women releasing garlands in a stream at the end of a religious festival.
There's a tragic poignancy to the colour snapshots sent back by Indo-Fijian emigrants to the settler societies of Canada
and New Zealand that Connew includes in the book. In one photo sent from suburban Auckland, five men sip on cans of beer
with a loaf of white bread and pottle of tomato sauce providing proof of their assimilation into Kiwi culture. It's an
entirely different world from that in Connew's black and white Fiji photos.
Documentary photography can at times be a cold, almost vulturish profession. The photographer "shoots", "captures" or
"takes" a picture. And then, perhaps because a picture is worth 1000 words, he or she will deem it unnecessary to record
even the two or three words required to dignify the subject with a name, age or location.
Connew and the book's designer Cathryn Griffith have avoided the visual clutter of captions by reproducing all the
photos in miniature at the back of the book along with a paragraph about each. The paragraphs read like, unedited, diary
entries and contain a mixture of the highly personal (who's married who) and the political (land tenure). It's a neat
solution to the problem of visual clutter but might have worked even better if the captions had been kept briefer and
the political, social and economic insights had been worked into a brief essay.
The cloth-covered book, printed in Italy, is beautifully produced, a delight to hold and almost flawless. Only "almost"
because there's one photo of a couple of men sleeping in a cane field where one of them has his face neatly cut in two
by the book's stitching.
This is an extraordinary book that will act as a lasting reminder of fast disappearing community.
***
'I SAW YOU....', By BRUCE CONNEWVAPOUR MOMENTA BOOKS (RRP $60), Reviewed By JEREMY ROSE
I SAW YOU... is an altogether different book. A series of snapshots taken through a telephoto lens from Connew and
Griffiths' Wellington house of unsuspecting people in the car park at Balena Bay.
Connew has a reputation as Mr Anti-Crop: a tireless defender of the right of his photos to exist exactly as he framed
them through his Nikon viewfinder.
So it's a surprise to see him produce a body of work that his so heavily cropped and photo-shopped.
The series of square, colour images are both beautiful and creepy. Blurred to the point of appearing to be impressionist
paintings the works have a painterly charm. But there's something uncomfortable about looking at, to take one example, a
photo of a boy - or perhaps it's a girl - adjusting his/her speedos and knowing that he/she was being watched through a
telephoto lens.
But then as Bruce has said it's a comment on the surveillance society and how we're always being watched.
Jeremy Rose is the editor of the Scoop Review of Book. He travelled to Papua New Guinea and Bougainville with Bruce
Connew to collect material for New Zealand Abroad: The story of VSA in Africa, Asia and the Pacific.
Related reviews, interviews and Youtube film
***
Jeremy Rose is the editor of the Scoop Review of Books and Wellington journalist.