Photographer finds gold in landscapes

As a child on holiday by the Clutha River, Bruce Foster took a cooking pan from the cabin and went down to the river’s edge to pan for gold.

He didn’t find any, but the impact made by the roaring river in the valley of the Cromwell Gorge has stayed with him to this day.

Thanks to the Clyde Dam, that environment changed forever – and as a young photographer, Foster captured that, too.

Now, his more recent images of Central Otago form part of Postcards from New Zealand, a YouTube series created by the Auckland Festival of Photography.

The web series includes art, artist talks and webinars by local photographers, featuring new material and selected elements of the June festival.

Foster’s passion for photography began in 1972, when he stepped into the Photographers’ Gallery and Bookshop in London.

He first graduated as a structural engineer, but soon realised it wasn’t for him. After a stint hitchhiking around Japan, picking up an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic with screw-in lenses along the way, the exhibition in London blew his mind.

In 1980, he graduated with a master’s from Auckland University’s Elam School of Fine Arts, but his engineering background drew him to the intersection of man-made structures and the natural environment.

‘‘I’ve never photographed the unaltered landscape,’’ he says. ‘‘I’ve felt incapable of doing that, or saying anything meaningful through that. I always find when I’m in a natural, nearpristine environment, I want to experience it for what it is.’’

Foster and his wife, author Kate De Goldi, recently spent a year down south in Alexandra.

After floods disrupted the water supply, which comes from the Clutha River, Foster found himself researching the source of the aquifers, and soon discovered the landscape had its own stories to tell.

The photographs were taken by drone, or from aircraft where the seats were removed to reveal a tiny hole big enough for a camera lens, Foster kneeling on the floor of the plane as the land rolled past miles below.

They showed the effect of years of extensive hydraulic mining in Otago.

The picture painted by Foster’s aerial photographs is that of a nation gripped by a frenzy for gold, leaving the landscape scarred.

Foster’s next exhibition, Toitu¯ Te Whenua – The Land Will Always Remain, is a collaboration by five artists investigating forces that shape land and identity. It opens at Aratoi in Masterton on September 4.