John Botton(FPSNZ)
My earliest encounter with photography was being entrusted with my grandfather’s Kodak Box Brownie. I was fascinated by the idea that this little black box could “catch” a picture—somehow storing a moment until the local pharmacy transformed it into a tangible print. The negatives themselves, ghostly images burned onto strips of celluloid, were just as mysterious.
That short-lived honour ended after I opened the camera “to see how it worked,” accidentally exposing and ruining an entire roll of film—and with it, a month’s worth of memories. My photographic journey faded out… for a while.
Decades later, during a working trip to Mauritius in the 1980s, my passion was rekindled. I was working as a television producer and cameraman, and borrowed a Minolta X-700 from a family member, packing a few rolls of Ilford black-and-white film. Between shoots, I wandered the back streets of Port Louis, capturing moments in still frames with the same intention I brought to moving images. When I finally returned and developed the film, I watched the latent images emerge in the darkroom like secrets revealed—intimate, luminous, and utterly transformative.
That sense of wonder has never left me. Over the years, my practice has grown to embrace both film and (horror of horrors!) digital image-making. My work continues to explore the tension between observation and emotion, memory and presence.
I am honoured to hold a Fellowship with the Photographic Society of New Zealand.
Artist’s Statement
For me, the creative process is a weird and wonderful experience—sometimes spontaneous, sometimes the result of a long, meandering thought process. It can be empirical, intuitive, or even sparked by a re-examination of another artist’s work. But at its core, it is always anchored in feeling—a powerful emotional response to the moment unfolding in front of the lens.
Whether it’s the shifting light draped across a landscape or that fleeting “moment of alignment” in a street scene, the intensity is the same. When I revisit my images, I’m taken back to that exact moment—the same emotional charge I felt as the shutter clicked, freezing time into a single frame.
Photography, for me, is a moment of joy and reverence. A celebration of perception, presence, and the vast, beautiful space we briefly occupy in this universe.