a raindrop, a flowing river

Forest and Bird, Issue 292, 1 May 1999, Page 48

a raindrop, a flowing river

photographs by Graeme Matthews, haiku by Ernest Berry, unpaginated, Graeme Matthews Photoimage, 193 Rarangi Beach road, Blenheim, 1998, RRP$59.95.

Graeme Matthews now publishes his own books, 10 of them to date since The Edge of the Land, about coastal New Zealand, in 1983. This coffee table volume displays a fine selection of his natural landscape pictures with the invitation to ‘come to these pages with your own unique imagination. The photographs ‘work best’, according to Graeme Matthews, ‘when they evoke an emotion. The minimalist haiku form of Japanese poetry adds a few syllables of perspective to each image. The intention is ‘to take the reader "inside" the photograph, "to understand the rustling of the leaves." Many of the pictures are of New Zealand but there are many also from other places, the geography sometimes indicated by the haiku, but often only by the ‘reader’s’ recognition of foreign species. As to the content, there is the customary but evocative selection of landscapes captured at the margins of the day; some of the tree photographs are particularly striking. For people whose imaginations are not already dulled by the constant bombardment of arresting visual images, there is space here to contemplate one man’s vision ‘of living on a beautiful planet?