'Working Life': Peter James Quinn - Floor Talk

Join us for a floor talk with Peter James Quinn whose photography has been capturing images of New Zealanders at work over the length of the country for the past thirty years.

Photography from Peter’s extensive career features in our upcoming exhibition in the Calder & Lawson Gallery Working Life: Photographs by Peter James Quinn which comes from the New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te Pūkenga Whakaata and was developed in association with Statistics New Zealand. It was originally shown at the end of 2019, and since this time the exhibition has taken on another layer of enquiry as we enter a time when Stats NZ is reporting that 185,000 workers expect to lose their jobs within the next year.

Peter joins us for a lunch time talk in the gallery reflecting on not only his career in documentary photography which includes long-spanning work for New Zealand Geographic and several significant publications, but his experiences documenting the working lives of New Zealanders and witnessing the vast changes which have occurred and drastically this year continue to occur in each of our working lives.

Photo: 'Cable logging "skiddy" crew members, Shane Learmond (centre) and Mike Derrett prune and process logs on a "dump" site in the Raukumara Range, East Cape (2002), © Peter James Quinn’