Kevin Capon and Carol Te Teira were in their mid-twenties when they set off from Ōtautahi / Christchurch in an old Thames van to photograph forty artists throughout Aotearoa New Zealand. “We were out on an adventure to meet people we thought were doing interesting things and to immerse ourselves into the land.” Artist Ralph Hotere was photographed in Port Chalmers, paintings hanging from his veranda, as he was preparing his major work Black Phoenix. Capon draws a connection between Māori and whenua (land): “The camera lens would move slowly over their skin like a slow-motion aerial landscape and I would only get a brief glimpse of them at the time of clicking the shutter.”

(Te Wheke, 2020)