Low Tide

In photography, it is often hard in shots that take in distant horizons to avoid the deadening effect of gazing into receding space. Here, drawing the eye to the foreground detail of the incoming tide reverses that effect with the small central sand islands submerging and the symmetry of intense blues at the top and in the bottom third of the picture frame. This image seems to be like a series of simple colour fields broken by a few black slashes that drive the eyes into these submerging islands. 

Craig Potton

Taken on Ashai Pentax 6/7. 45mm lens. 100 ASA Ektachrome film. Aperture F16.

Limited edition of 15

Two artist friends, the painter Neil Frazer and photographer Craig Potton, have spent many decades exploring and creating images of New Zealand’s remote and rugged coastlines. In All at Sea they combine both their paintings and photographs to present haunting and beautiful work, inspired by the ocean’s power and wild sublimity. In this book you witness a concurrence of vision, and an admission they both share of feeling almost overwhelmed by the intensity of these coastal landscapes. All at Sea is testimony to their love of place, but also a poignant plea for us to change our attitude towards our oceans, which are threatened by global warming, overfishing and pollution on a horrendous scale. All at Sea is a large format book with the highest quality of reproduction, an artbook to treasure and inspire.

Craig Potton & Neil Frazer - Punakaiki

Craig Potton

Craig Potton is New Zealand’s best known landscape photographer and an ardent conservationist. In pursuit of his photography he has tramped and climbed extensively in New Zealand, its sub-Antarctic Islands, the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, the Nepal Himalaya, and more recently Poland, India and Iceland. For more than four decades he has documented the New Zealand wilderness, exploring relationships between the concept of artistic beauty and wilderness in the natural world.

Craig started Craig Potton Publishing in 1987 and has had many of his own titles published, including New Zealand Aotearoa, one of New Zealand’s best-selling pictorial titles, Classic Walks of New Zealand, The Nature of Things, Moment and Memory, Offerings from Nepal and Here on Earth were all Montana New Zealand Book Award finalists in their publication year. More recently he has produced a major work New Zealand ‘s Wilderness Heritage and a large scale art book of his landscape photography, New Zealand.

He has worked as a Location/Stills Photographer on The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, Peter Pan and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe motion pictures. His photographic reputation continues to grow, with exhibitions at Christchurch Art Gallery, National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, and a major retrospective at the Rowe Gallery, North Carolina, USA and Luksfera Gallery in Poland and Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem. Craig has also conceived, screen-written and presented two New Zealand documentary series, Rivers (2010) and Wild Coasts (2011). At the 2011 New Zealand Scriptwriters Awards he won Best Documentary Script for his episode ‘Rangitata’.

Craig is an Ambassador for the New Zealand Royal Forest & Bird Protection Society and is actively involved in the New Zealand Green Party. He makes his home in Nelson and opened his own Gallery Store in Nelson in 2013.

“A good photo can sometimes be an arrow to the heart of things, alluding to or eliciting an immediate encounter. It is the nature of art and the way of nature to push us beyond the narrow realities we often become trapped in, to new or forgotten realms of pleasure.” Craig Potton, Moment and Memory.