The Kauri Glen Tree Top Walkway is just that — an elegant wooden walkway that enables the casual hiker to view the forest floor from the heights of its leafy canopy. It is a bird’s eye view.

I walked the tree top trail with my grandson the other day. We both love a walk in the woods. Never one to miss the opportunity to encourage my grandson’s interest in photography, I looped my camera strap around his shoulder and had him direct our photographic exploration.

Today’s photograph is my favourite image from his session portfolio.

words are superfluous . . . these ferns express all that need be conveyed

I enjoy opportunities to walk leisurely and closely examine store fronts. And, for the most part, they are store fronts and not display windows. The latter suggests intention, if not also artful pretence, that I find rare in the commercial districts of Auckland’s central city and its neighbouring suburbs.

The frontage of the retail shops that populate the thoroughfares I walk on a regular basis are for the most part austere, some would say threadbare and utilitarian. The shop owners, often first or second generation immigrants, find the daily struggles of keeping their businesses fully stocked and interiors ordered sufficiently demanding tasks. Concerns for the aesthetics of store-front windows are secondary, given the demands of securing goods and maintaining shelf stock, even superfluous if the business is already well known and customer traffic is brisk.

The store front in today’s entry is a visual presentation in two parts. There is first the window itself, an unassuming indeed chaotic mural of what has been or could be the start a tattoo design - the past, next or first ink-and-needle to skin. Smaller placards, either mounted on interior walls or held upright in easels, line the shop’s interior ledges and floor.

The image also presents a second showcase: an unobstructed and welcoming view, set in deep recess, of the shop’s interior of highly polished floor, of gleaming chest against gauzy curtain and of leg and foot — awaiting customers suggesting the parlour is popular and held in some regard.

I believe the photograph is a handsome black & white image and an entertaining story.

High Street, a narrow thoroughfare directly east of Queen Street in Auckland’s city centre, begins at Shortland Street and terminates, as High Street, at Victoria Street East. From the south side of Victoria Street, the diminutive roadway continues until Mayoral Drive sporting its new name as Lorne Street.

Lorne Street rivals Dominion Road for its density of Asian food restaurants and cafes. I am fairly confident that the cuisines of the vast majority of Asian countries, including India, are represented in the eatery establishments along Lorne Street.

Plus Chicken, the shop featured in this post’s image, is a takeaway-only restaurant on Lorne Street. It is as tiny as the street on which it is located. The fried chicken offerings are prepared in the Taiwanese/Chinese style, a preparation quite different from American fried chicken. Unlike the traditional presentation of American fried chicken of bone-in chicken fried in a thick and bready crust, the Taiwanese/Chinese style prepares boneless chicken that has been flattened into a cutlet and coated with sweet potato or tapioca/potato starch rather than wheat flour. A compliment of seasoning, and notably fried Thai basil leaves, are added after the chicken is fried rather than before frying, as is done in the American style. Finally, Taiwanese/Chinese style fried chicken is served in a paper bag and eaten in the bag from one edge of the chicken to the other, or sometimes on a skewer stick.

As for the photograph, the late afternoon light against the store front first caught my eye. The splash of orange window transom against the black and white building materials also interested me. Finally, the frame within frame portrait of the chef added a nice compositional touch.

There are many paths I could take to get from my apartment in the Wynyard Quarter precinct of Auckland’s city centre to the Auckland Art Gallery at the corner of Wellesley Street East and Kitchener Street, a distance on foot of 2km. With deliberate consistency, I elect to traverse the path that takes me across High Street to Lorne Street and then through Khartoum Place.

This premeditated route speaks to a deeply held belief of mine that a walk ought to embrace purpose and significance beyond physical exertion. It should command the senses, and foremost among them for a photographer: what might be seen.

For me, Khartoum Place is the stuff of a pilgrim’s journey for a three-fold reason, at once personal, civic and visual. With regard to the personal, my wife completed her academic training in the discipline of history, and specifically as a student of the 19th century American South. Her dissertation examined the remarkable life of Margaret Wickliffe Preston as recorded in the voluminous family papers housed in the Special Collections of the University of Kentucky Library.

The preparatory work to celebrate properly the centennial of the passage of the 19th amendment to the US Constitution — the amendment that extended to women the right to vote in all elections, local and national — promoted her to refocus her work from the antebellum South to the Reconstruction Period of the latter 19th century and to what many historians refer to as the Second Reconstruction of the 20th century.

With our emigration to New Zealand in 2018, Randolph cemented her scholarly focus on the unique women’s suffrage history of her adopted country. In 1893 New Zealand became the first country in the world to grant to women the right of universal suffrage, the power by parliamentary act to vote in all public elections. And that singular fact of world history brings me to the second fold of a pilgrimage to be understood in 3 parts.

Khartoum Place is the home of Auckland's Women’s Suffrage Memorial. I have previously posted about the Women’s Suffrage Mural at Khartoum Place. Suffice it to say here, I pause in a reverent moment to think about the extraordinary struggle that led to universal suffrage in New Zealand and to the pride I hold for the scholarly work that Randolph continues to contribute to our understanding of that history.

Finally, there is the photographic - a captivating visual celebration that architects and artists brilliantly captured in form, line and colour. With my photograph, taken from the stairs that lead from Kitchener Street to the Lorne Street plaza, I have attempted to capture the architectural beauty of the memorial plaza.

From Greymouth we drove to Lake Brunner for several days of long walks and relaxing amidst stark winter beauty.

The last leg of our journey took us south on SH6 toward Fox Glacier, our next destination. We stopped along the way in the delightful seaside town of Hokitika and toured the nearby Wēta Pounamu Pathway exhibition centre. It not being tourist season, we had Fox Glacier Village and its environs to ourselves. The views of the Southern Alps, and notably of the Fox Glacier, were stunning.

Below are 4 galleries of my favourite photographs from the trip.

I am an easy mark for any scene bathed in dappled light. So, too, for Gothic Revival church architecture.

To have found, while on an urban walk with my grandson, the St Patrick’s Cathedral awash with light & shadow from late afternoon illumination was a splendid circumstance. What I could not have expected was to also find a holographic-like effect on the church’s gabled roof.

Let’s unpack the visual effect. The roof line is bedecked with six gabled dormer windows. I believe the architectural term for the window on this Gothic Revival building is a lucarne. A properly trained architectural historian will prove me wrong, again.

Over the years hard rains have weathered the roof tiles unevenly in perfectly vertical trails downward from either edge of each diminutive window. As a consequence, the sharply angled light of late afternoon may create the ephemeral effect of pairs of the columns — faux pilasters— superimposed underneath each of the six gabled dormer windows, as illustrated in today’s image.

The overall visual effect was intoxicating.

Installed in stages from 1913 to 1923 and refurbished in recent years with LED lighting, the 37 ornamental street lamps along the port side of Quay Street are known collectively as Auckland’s Red Fence.

The array of ornamental street lamps are a distinctive feature of Quay Street. They are especially stunning at night, as my photograph from a previous post illustrates:

This is why, as often as is possible, one should time a photographic walk in anticipation of the golden hour.

Vulcan Lane is a pedestrian-only thoroughfare that wends its way eastward from Queen Street, crosses High Street and ends its journey at O’Connell Street. Other lanes or diminutive streets in Auckland Central, some pedestrians-only and others with limited one-way car traffic patterns, include Fort, Snickel, Durham, Imperial and Bacons. All share an old-world charm, characterised by distinctive human-scale architecture, boutique retail shops and atmospheric cafes.

Heritage New Zealand offers an informative narrative of Vulcan Lane’s history as a commercial and social destination within Auckland Central.

One section of the narrative that I found especially noteworthy reads as follows:

In the 1920’s the lane was widened by about 15ft on the south side, and new commercial buildings were being erected in the area. Any new buildings constructed in the lane had to conform with the Council’s requirements and hence the lane adopted a wider more spacious and sunlit appearance. 1

Few areas of public policy have taken more hits by critics on the left- and right-side of the political fence than zoning & planning requirements. The problems are real, but complex, and consequential. However, one need only walk the length of Vulcan Lane to conclude that the judicious application of zoning and design frameworks to preserve the historically significant character of modest areas of a city can be enormously beneficial to the life of a city — to our liveability in it and to our understanding of its changing character, both continuous and adaptive, over time.

The particular strength and vitality of the weekly Wynyard Quarter night markets is that the weekend events attract families that could not otherwise afford a dinner outing. The night market culinary offerings are varied, tasty and moderately priced.

Parents also know that the Silo Park playground and neighbouring public spaces are fun and safe. There is a palpable sense of shared responsibility in Wynyard Quarter -- we watch-out for one another, residents and visitors alike.

Time wandering amongst the crowds at my precinct’s weekend night markets is a restorative tonic for me.

There are layers of biography and explanatory text associated with this image.

Let’s start with the ethics of candid street photography. Is a candid street photograph, one taken without the knowledge or permission of the subject, a form of theft or at least an invasion of personal space? I have not fully formed an answer to that question and, in not doing so, I have resolved to forego any commercial profit from this stealthy practice. I won’t sell a print of a person from whom I have neither obtained permission nor offered compensation. And my Substack, by intent, was never meant to be a commercial endeavour.

As to the question of why I was attracted to his profile, photographically speaking, my answer is rather subjective and speculative. I am fascinated by how people present themselves in public places - from styles of dress and bodily or jewelled ornamentation to facial expressions and postures of engagement or withdrawal.

In the instance of this bus rider, I was keenly interested in the intensity of his facial expression; and therein lies the speculative rub. Perhaps it is the learned habit of someone who needs to say ‘don’t mess with me.’ Or the assumed expression of someone lost in deep thought. Lastly, and more simply, it could be the countenance of someone grateful for a moment’s respite on a bus.

I know this much: I love the endless trail of his beard.

Looking up, down and behind are critical photographic prompts. In the instance of this entry, down and behind were the operative impulses.

Inspired by a video presented at the YouTube channel Photographic Inspiration, I took a walk along a familiar path in Wynyard Quarter. The practice frame for this outing was to maintain the discipline of looking up, down and behind. The mantra served me well.

Looking down rather than straight ahead allowed me to spot a storm sewer grating. The strong repeating pattern of geometric rectangles served as contrasting background for the dominant figure of the red iron valve, itself encased within a concentric circle. As my wife remarked when she saw the image: “It is something my husband would notice and consider visually curious.” The cement casing of the storm sewer on which the grating was placed punctuated the interplay of geometries.

Farther on, I walked behind a structure at one end of the Jellicoe Street carpark, which revealed another odd treasure. Someone had taken the time to paint a piece of corrugated siding that lined one edge of a raised street garden. Capturing the photograph with a wide-open aperture at close proximity ensured that the siding and flowers, with their dominant red and delicate yellow hues, would attract the eye of viewer. The visual wash of the gauzy background, the artistic consequence of a shallow depth of field, added a nice finishing touch to the photographic elements of the composition.

I was reminded of an old joke shared amongst architects:

“How do you know that there’s an architecture convention taking place in town?

Everyone in a crush of pedestrians is looking up.”

From a compositional perspective, I love this photograph for its echo of visual triangles - in the first instance, the triangle formed by the pair of dog leashes and dog bodies at its base; and in the second instance: the bodily outlines of the father and son, completed by the lower-frame edge of the cart behind the father.

Of course, the cascade of tenderness — from father to son, from son to dog — is the visual story.

A current exhibit at the Auckland Art Gallery is a show of contemporary Chinese art across much of visual arts media from painting, photography and sculpture to video and mixed media installations. The exhibition examines how rapid urbanisation, globalisation and shifting social values have reshaped artistic practice.

The gallery’s atrium foyer hosts a large-scale stone sculpture — today’s photograph — which combines a Buddhist figure representative of China’s Tianlongshan grottoes with the form of the Greek sculpture Winged Victory of Samothrace.

In terms of scale, curator Hutch Wilco describes it as a 7-metre-high, 3-tonne carved stone sculpture that towers in the atrium foyer — it was so large it had to be jimmied through the back doors with mere inches to spare.

The work fuses two of the supreme icons of Eastern and Western artistic tradition — the Winged Victory representing the apex of ancient Greek achievement and the Bodhisattva representing the highest spiritual ideal of Buddhist civilisation. By joining them head-to-head (literally — the Buddha figure is inverted and grafted at the neck of the Winged Victory), Xu Zhen stages a collision between two distinct cosmologies, neither of which can claim primacy over the other.

Are they sentinels, staunchly charged
with protecting the library from a horde
of book-burning barbarians,
or themselves that marauding army
on the adavnce?

The bushes either way appear ominous.

In relief, the library remains resolute,
a monument that captures fierce symmetry in stone -
textured, proportioned and exacting.

An expression of implacable beauty.

My eye was drawn first to the windows. The geometric designs of the window metalwork and stacked window arches communicate an Art Deco sensibility. I see elegant and complex refinements - of shapes within shapes repeated from one window to the next but in each instance conceived in a novel rectalinear pattern.

The shadows cast by the windswept tree danced in dappled light on the building facade.

I waited patiently as the three sidewalk pedestrians moved into place.

The Pullman footprint at the corner of Waterloo Crescent and Princes Street in Auckland Central is actually two footprints. The Pullman Hotel fronts along the Waterloo Crescent thouroghfare. In my opinion, the hotel’s exterior is dull and unadorned compared to the elegance of the hotel’s interiors. The interiors are richly appointed.

Astride the Princes Street corridor of the complex are the Pullman Residences, two and three bedroom apartments available for short- and long-stay accomodations. The Princes Street facade, a detail of which is pictured here, is quite distinctive.

The cantilevered porches and roof line have been designed to express an uncluttered but maximal visual statement. The white overlapping porches produce strong contrasts of light and shadow - a dramatic interplay of tonal extremes which makes for a powerful black & white photograph.

The visual impact of the facade is further heightended by the interplay of varied lengths in the porch forms - from long and bevelled lengths on the left that approximate rectilinear shapes to porch length of subtle but increasingly shortened length as the eye moves from left to right. The irregular patterns propel the visual movement of the facade.

The capstone design element, which for me accentuates the impression that the segments are floating, is the repeating pattern of angled edges on the left-hand side of each smaller porch segment. As a design conseqence, the porch enclosures are rendered as irregular quadrilaterals. That syncopated rhythm of irregular porch forms creates a dynamic tension, an imbalance within the visual plane of the facade that further enhances the vibrant impression of movement and suspension.

Lastly, an echo of cantilevered forms can be seen in the roof line. The seductive curve of each roof segment is lovely. Again we see an interplay, and resulting tension, of opposites - the straight line that forms the left-edge of each roof segment from which a delicate curvilinear portion extends and defines the shape.

The Pullman Residences facade is a refined example of visually stunning architectural design.

For much of our 47 years together my wife and I have had a satisfying division of labour. Randolph enjoys cooking, and she is a superb chef. She also loathes the chore of dinner clean-up. In a moment of contrite confession she has admitted that, in the course of meal preparation, her habit of using every sauce pan — every kitchen utensil no matter how well hidden from reach — is a baked-in culinary reflex. Her dread of facing the kitchen carnage of an impeccably prepared meal is palpable. Fair enough, the dude does the dishes.

Not to worry . . . I not only enjoy immensely her culinary creations, I also relish the time of quiet reverie or splashes of jazz music via AirPods that attend the Sisyphian task of post-feast kicthen restoration.

I am also the partner who sets the dinner table, an easy task when place settings are limited to two persons, but the chore is within my dinnertime remit. Therefore, I was especially attentive when I saw the gentleman featured in today’s photograph begin to set his table, a reclusive edge of a pedestrian lane that connects Queen and High Streets. His Fanta drink marked one edge of his table, followed by the makings of his mains - a collection of fast food favourtites - gingerly placed in other quadrants.

With equal alacrity he set himself on the hard sidewalk, surveyed his dinner victuals and began to eat with relentless intensity what was likely his sole rations of the day.

New Zealand was the first self-governing country to grant women the right to vote in national elections. It did so by act of parliament in 1893.

Khartoum Place in Auckland Central memorialises this momentous moment in the worldwide suffrage movement, which took root in the 19th century, to expand the Enlightenment ideal of political equality by extending full political agency to New Zealand women.

A different form of movement — a visual movement — capivated me as I approached the plaza from the Auckland Art Gallery. I had been reflecting on my study of an Hungarian born photographer, Gyula Halász, who as an expatriate living in Paris produced a portfolio of stunning black & white photographs of Paris at night and published them under the pseudonym Brassaï.

Brassaï’s oeuvre is hauntingly beautiful, each print an evocative play of form, line and light. The finest black & white photographs — think of Ansel Adam’s images — exploit the full range of the gray scale, from pure black to pure white. Brassaï’s photographs are marked by spectacular washes of light, shadow and granular texture, all impeccably composed.

If imitation is a high form of flattery, then my humble attempt here should be understood to be a modest but sincere nod to Brassaï’s photographic legacy.