Songs of Innocence - Photographs of a New Zealand Childhood by John Pascoe

Mahara Gallery/Pacific Press, 2005. In good used condition.

John Pascoe (1908-1972) has been described as New Zealand's greatest unrecognised photographer of the 20th century. Yet he was the first of a handful of practitioners (including Brian Brake, Ans Westra and Marti Friedlander) who developed documentary photography in New Zealand between 1940 and 1965. A poetic distillation from the Pascoe family archive, Songs of Innocence foregrounds Pascoe's private photography revealing a nuanced record of the early lives of his four daughters. An intimate portrait of family life in New Zealand during the 1940s and 1950s emerges from more than 60 delightful photographs, most of which have not been seen outside the family. In her essay editor, Janet Bayly, considers this body of work alongside Pascoe's public work and gives us the most complete and insightful account yet of this key figure in New Zealand's photographic history. Janet Bayly has been involved with photography for nearly thirty years. In 1985 she co-authored the book Witness to Change: Photographs 1940 -1965, which first brought Pascoe's photographs to wider public attention. Songs of Innocence is based on an exhibition of the same name that is currently touring nationally....