About John Botton(FPSNZ)

My earliest association with cameras was being given the responsibility of handling my grandfathers Kodak box brownie. I was fascinated by the concept of pictures being “caught” by the little black box and somehow stored until the pharmacy somehow transformed them into tangible prints. I was even more bewildered by the negative image burned onto the strips of celluloid. After opening the camera “to see how it worked” and ruining the roll of film inside, along with a months worth of captured images, I was never given the honor of taking any pictures. Sadly, that was where my early experiences with cameras faded…

Until my passion for photography was re-awakened during a working trip to Mauritius during the 80s. I was working as a television producer/camera man at the time and had borrowed a Minolta x700 from a family member and loaded a few rolls of Ilford B&W film into my pack in preparation for the trip. Taking time between shoots, I wandered the back streets of Port Louis, camera in hand, and began exploring the art of capturing a single frame that would communicate the same emotion and energy that I had been doing at 25 frames a second. The exposed film was only developed some weeks later on my return to home base, and the next level of excitement took root. Watching the latent image reveal itself in the dark room was like peeping through the keyhole of the vault door holding back the universe.

This passion has grown over the years and now includes(horror of horrors) digital images origination.

I have recently been awarded my Fellowship from the Photographic Society of New Zealand.

Artist’s Statement

For me, the creative process has always been a weird and wonderful thing to experience. Sometimes it is spontaneous. Sometimes it is the culmination of a long and winding cerebral process. Sometimes it is empirical in nature. Sometimes it is a re-examination of the experience of another artists work. But, it is always underpinned by a feeling. A powerful emotional response to the scene unfolding before me, weather it is the changing light gently draped across a landscape or that “moment of alignment” when shooting street scenes, the intensity is the same. Whenever I look at the images I have created, I re-experience the same feeling I did when the shutter activated and the moment in time was frozen forever. It is an intense moment of joy and celebration of the awesome space we occupy in the universe.